Sunday - Oct 25 - Bletchley Park

Today, Sunday Oct 25 Shelly went with us to Bletchley Park.

Last night we figured out the best way for us to get there, and since we missed the direct trains that run Monday through Saturday, oh well - BUST! We went ahead with plans and slept to a decent hour (9am!) and had a leisure morning. Since when is daylight savings time here in the UK? The time went back one hour here last night, we didn't even know until this morning. Shelly said it changes here a few weeks before it changes in the US.

Anyway, caught the trip to Bletchley and it seemed like a slow boat to China. My data plan sort of whittled down to nothing :O , holy crap!
It was a two hour trip each way, with 2 train changes. It made for a long day.
Woking -> Clapham Junction -> Watford Junction -> Bletchley and the opposite returning.
As we had time we would stop for tea and a quick snack in the stations.
Everything went fine with the two train changes each way, no issues.

Bletchley Park is a beautiful place and not far from the station so off we went. Fascinating museum that focuses on all the people that worked there, with what it seemed to be a gauze veil between Turing and the rest.

They have in existence a reconstructed Bombe machine. A gentleman gave a lecture and example of how the enigma machine works, and how the Bombe works, and how it was designed to decode the enigma.
After he finished speaking he introduced Ruth Bourne, who is one of the wren's that worked on the Bombe. She told us of how they functioned and how a days work would go down. It was very interesting and quite a treat to have one of our seniors that actually worked there speak of her experiences. She said they did not know what they were actually doing, other than 'we are breaking german codes'. Her task was to run a test code through the Bombe and see if any 'stops' are found. When found they would collect various data and send it over to another hut, and restart the machine looking for other possible combinations, because sometimes a random combination would be found by accident which was not the real code.

It was interesting that the Bombe did not actually do the complete decoding. It decoded it so far, and then another machine called the 'checker' was used, and it also took some brute force by mathematicians to finish it up.

We picked up several books at the gift shop. One of them 'Bletchley Park - Demystifying the Bombe' by Dermot Turing, nephew of Alan Turing, tells how the Bombe machine works in pretty good detail, in laymen's terms.

We traveled home and picked up some dinner at a M&S in the Clapham Junction station. Then onto the train to get to Woking. This train was full with people coming back from the NFL football game in London. It is actually held at the Wembley stadium northwest of London. They had seen the Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars. We squeezed into a seat and entered in the conversations. It was a lot of fun and the people we very entertaining. They told us how BIG the BFL is her in London. They said 80,000 people attend the games, and it sells out very quickly.

Back at Shelly's and Shelly hooked up her Apple TV so we could watch some shows on Netflix. She hot not seen Gotham, so we watched the first episode and she really enjoyed it. It is one of our favorite shows.

We that is about it for today.
Tomorrow we are going to see parliament in action!...