Southampton, England

 Today is the end of another segment so much activity going on this morning.  Our tour left at 9:30 am for Winchester Cathedral (again, the song runs through my head.)  It was a short 35-minute ride to Winchester, which is a very nice town.  The Cathedral is beautiful.  The oldest parts go back to the 11th century.  In 1906-1911 William Walker worked extensively on rebuilding the crumbling foundation.  He, and others, had to dive into the waters underneath with air being hand pumped into a diving suit.

The back of the Cathedral. 

You can clearly see the stone on the right that has been cleaned.

The flying buttresses

The front of the Cathedral

The size is almost incomprehensible

Jane Austen is buried here in the floor in front of this wall memorial.

This part dates from 1079 - 1150

The windows now are mostly from the 1700s and 1800s

This window was restored in 1660 after it was destroyed during the civil war from 1642-1648.  It no longer shows anything in particular, because they just couldn't put it all back correctly, so they grouped similar color pieces together that were collected from all the shattered glass they could collect.

After a long wander around the Cathedral, we walked down the High Street.  It was cloudy but pretty warm and there were lots of people about.  We stopped at a Boots (like a Walgreens) where I asked the pharmacy staff for suggestions on a rash I'd developed late yesterday.  She suggested it was an allergy/heat rash and so I picked up some allergy tablets and an anti-itch lotion.  Hope that does the trick.  We stopped at a coffee shop and spent some time at the outside table just enjoying the atmosphere.  There was a guitar-playing street musician who was quite good.  It was wonderful to people-watch while listening to music from the Beach Boys, Elvis, and the Beatles. 

On the bus ride back we learned of Boris Johnson's resignation.   It was obviously coming after yesterday's mass exodus of ministers, but still a bit of a shock.  

Nino told us that this segment will have 320 passengers, so about 100 fewer than we just had.  It will be nice to have a bit more room with only about 60% of capacity. And we also learned that the man involved in the medical emergency last night is alright, which is a relief.

We had a nice dinner with Lois & Patrick, Carl, and Maureen & Jim at Sette Mari.  Tonight we go ahead one hour again, so we turned in afterwards.