April 15th 2023 Day 102 of 128

Portland (Weymouth), England

Hello from Jolly Ol’ England. We finally got to come into port early this morning after the cargo ship moved out of the slip. The cruise director, Ian, started making announcements for passengers to report for face to face immigration inspection at 7:00am. Megan and I got up and got ready to head for inspection. We finally got called about 8:00am and we headed off to complete our inspections. After immigration we went to the Pinnacle for breakfast. We hadn’t been there in a while and everyone told us it was nice to see us back again. After breakfast we headed back to our cabin to relax, rest and to watch a movie. I have been fighting a sore throat for a couple of days and it is affecting my sleep so it was nice to rest. At noon we got all ready to head out and went up to the Lido and grabbed something to eat for lunch. Next, we headed to the main stage to meet our excursion group at 1:00pm. We headed out for a drive around Portland before we headed through Weymouth and on to Bovinton to visit the Tank Museum. It was a great afternoon walking through the museum and followed the progression of the invention and modifications made to tanks over the years. It was quite an impressive display. We had two hours there and it wasn’t enough time to see all that they had and read all the displays. They had a few “famous” tanks in the museum. The most famous was the tank Brad Pitt used in the movie “Fury”. They had a display to the movie with several props and costumes. On the way back to the pier we drove by the place where Lawrence of Arabia got in a motorcycle accident and then died six days later. We also got to see the former sight of a WWII airstrip. There is much history here; the landing sight of thousands of troops that came over on the Queen Mary before going to Normandy, the fishing history here, and the home of a former torpedo factory. It was great to learn more about the rich history in Europe today. When we got back to the ship we were greeting by an entire choir that had come to sing us off. There were also four men dressed in period military uniforms. They brought out a cannon and shot it off three times as we puled out of port. The first one that went off, we were still right next to the pier, and we were right next to the cannon and I could feel it in my chest. The other two rounds went off as we got further away from the dock. It was one of the coolest send offs I had ever been a part of. After the sail away Megan and I went to the Lido for dinner. It was steak night and they had almost every kind of cow preparation you could think of. We had a great dinner and then headed back to the cabin for an early bedtime. We popped on a movie, I wrote my blog and we got into our jammies. Hope you all are having a wonderful Saturday doing what ever you are doing. Hugs from us to you.