Our final day of included touring from our hotel in London had the whole day devoted to Bletchley Park. Each of our London hotel based days featured included tours that were the only tours offered. If you were not interested in visiting these locations, you were free as always to find your own transportation and pay your own way if you'd rather spend the time seeing other things like London's famous city attractions. We did have some group members who chose to do that. If this had been our first visit to London, I would have been tempted to do the same. This itinerary is such an immersive program designed around one theme that it really caters to those who have a deep interest in the history of D-Day.
This museum complex is spread out over a series of buildings where they have turned the actual dwellings into exhibits. It does require a lot of walking between the buildings but there are benches throughout as well as ramps and elevators. Some areas require walking up hills and steep inclines but is mostly paved asphalt. Tickets cost £28 per adult but our admission was covered by Viking. Our Coach 1 tour time ran from 8:30AM to 5:30PM.
During the drive to Bletchley Park (a good drive away from the city so not something you can easily return early from), our guide told us that we'd be free to roam on our own for the entire time. By the time we arrived, that plan had changed to wanting us to do a guided walking tour with a guide from the museum that we were supposed to meet about halfway up amongst the buildings. Then the rest of the time would be ours to explore on our own. For some reason, only one illustrated map was provided to our guide so he had us all gather around him holding it open once off the bus in order to get a picture to use during our time here.
After we got pictures of the map, we headed up to where we expected to meet the tour guide. The weather was cold and blustery and by the time we made it up the hill to find no sign of a tour guide, we decided to bow out of the guided outdoor walking tour and start exploring on our own. There were a couple school groups being led around but it was only crowded in the smaller buildings where a lot of the display is in one space.
There were a good bit of video components to these exhibits allowing visitors to sit and take a break from the walking to watch. Plenty of signs and written explanations so you can spend as little or as long at each display as you wanted.
I thought this way of displaying D-Day with a nod to the codebreakers outside of the Teleprinter buildings was really interesting.
Looking at the display from behind:
Large print and "tactile" or braille guides were available to pick up as you entered some buildings.
Hologram images of those who worked in these buildings were displayed on the walls along with quotes about their time here.
There were also audio features throughout the exhibits where you could listen to the people tell their own stories.
Another section featured an example of the limited information the codebreakers would have been handed and tools for you to try your hand at figuring out the rest of the information like they did.
More geared towards kids was an area where you could learn about all the jobs held by the people who worked here and try on examples of their uniforms.
After touring several of the buildings and ending with their newest exhibit dedicated to the use of A.I. and how Bletchley Park's work was such a precursor to this new technology, I left Dad to rest on the benches while I walked over to see the exterior of The Mansion. I opted out of walking further to see the stables etc.
Once back at the main building, we visited the little cafe on site to grab sandwiches, waters, and a rocky road brownie treat for Dad. He wasn't a fan because it was also rock hard and included cherries so he went back for ice cream. Lunch was on our own and at our own expense.
After lunch, we returned to another movie viewing space inside the main building that we had skipped since there was a crowd and no more seats when we first arrived. After the movie, I browsed the gift shop and picked up a couple puzzle books featuring crosswords and cryptograms. I had visions of passing the downtime on our cruise working to solve the puzzles in these books. They sat in our suitcases untouched so long that I accidentally stored away our suitcases at home before remembering they were in the front pocket! Now I keep them next to the couch and enjoy solving the puzzles at home.
Once we returned to the hotel, we stopped at the Viking desk within the hotel lobby to turn in our Quiet Vox boxes and receive our information and train tickets for the next day's Eurostar transfer to the Viking Radgrid. We were told to keep our earbuds so we could reuse them with the ship's provided boxes but also assured that the ship would provide their own earbuds. We returned back to our room to quickly pack up our suitcases as the luggage pickup from our rooms would begin at 6:30PM. We were sent luggage tags with our transfer stickers in the mail pre-cruise but were also given ones to use when we checked in with Viking at the hotel on the first night. The information letter for this ship transfer step insisted that these new tags were the ones that had to be on our luggage or it wouldn't be picked up from our hotel rooms. I visited the Executive Lounge one last time to grab snacks and we relaxed in the room for the rest of the night.
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