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European Adventure 2017
Sunday was a lovely quiet day with only one important event planned and that was supper with Ryan and his English 'family" Damien and Frankie and Frankie's parents Stefano and Natalie and her sister Christina. It was lovely to meet them and see how comfortable Ryan is with them all. Some lovely blueberry muffins from Natalie went down a treat and we felt very welcome. Our stop for the night was a pub car park and in the morning we wandered into town for a coffee and a visit to the library where we printed off our boarding passes for our trip to Prague. We found a lovely campsite with a very rural outlook and waited there for Lidka and Leicester to join us as we hadn't seen then for quite some time. It was to be a great night as shortly after they arrived they got news of the safe arrival of their 5th grandchild, Benjamin Miles Wilson. Congratulations Lisa and Adam! Tuesday was fine but had a cool breeze as we set off to see the Thames Barrier. It certainly was a highly technical answer to a serious problem and we were disappointed to find that the information centre was closed so we had only a couple of signage boards to look at to see how it all worked. It was bitterly cold so we didn't hang around and instead headed up to a rather interesting place, the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker. This was hidden in a wood and was surrounded by a wire fence. It was designed to give us the feeling of being somewhere top secret I suspect! We were greeted by a TV monitor telling us to pick up a headset and to follow instructions. We were not allowed to take photos inside unfortunately but on the outside it looked like an ordinary bungalow in the countryside, miles from anywhere. Inside it was anything but. A maze of corridors and rooms were built 100 feet underground and were encased in 10ft thick concrete walls. The entrance corridor was 150m long and there were three floors, the bottom one for all the communications and from where the Prime Minister would have addressed the nation and his ministers who would have been with him/her. The middle one was operations and the top floor was the 1st aid room and mini operating theatre and the quarters for the 600 odd staff who would have had to be there if a nuclear bomb had gone off. It was built in 1952 and was regularly used for training until 1992 when it was decommissioned. It was equipped for the 600 people to spend 3 months trapped inside monitoring the effects of a nuclear hit and running the country. Tomorrow is clean up day and then off to Prague for a further adventure.
- comments
mum who needs science fiction!? glad you saw the Thames Barrier.