Today was Robert’s 66th birthday and the greatest gift he made himself was achieving more than 4.000km on this adventurous “Less-is-more-Tour” trip healthy and without any accident. He never imagined he would be able to get this far, but now he was celebrating in England.
I had a very easily transportable gift for him, which I originally wanted to hand over with an unfolding 3D-papercard of two bikers in the mountains, but in the hustle of packing at home I had forgotten to put it in the right place. So I only had a red envelope with a small surprise for him. It was a ticket to the concert of Bodo Wartke, as a reference to his “Lovesong” which I had sung at our wedding in 2010.
Our plan for today was to take the train to Portsmouth and to have a look at the historic ships in the Royal Navy Museum. It’s a huge area with an immense collection of warships, which have been renovated and put on display for visitors.
The most famous ship of them is the HMS “Victory”, which was in 1805 involved in the battle of Trafalgar, where Vice Admiral Nelson had been lethally struck by a musket ball and died under deck. Walking through all the narrow spaces in between canons, water pumps and operating rooms, we were given an audio device which told us not only the horror of the battle, but let us hear all the thunder and crashing, the screaming of the wounded and the gunfire. It was so drastically realistic, and even cut off hands and legs were lying fully bloody in the buckets and on the operating table.
As Robert is a very empathetic person he usually can’t bear bloody stories. So I was not sure if he took the right choice of visit for his birthday. Besides being impressed by standing in the original, we were depressed by the cruelty and misery men were able to get themselves into. It was quite heavy on us and we were happy to be out of this massive boat with its low ceilings and all the bad karma it had gathered.
Afterwards we still had a look at the archaeological discoveries of the “Mary Rose”, but we were quite overwhelmed after what we had seen and strolled back into town for some shopping at the Gunwharf Quays at Musto, where Robert found himself a hoody as replacement for the sweater he had lost around Gijon.
We took the train back to Fareham, where Iain picked us up at the railway station. We had dinner at the Indian restaurant “Veranda” in Wickham and after returning back home I was able to finish the cut of my surprise film for Robert by midnight.
