It was great having Jamie home for her birthday but the days just flew by. She managed to fit in visiting a school friend, have her eyes tested, spend time with Carly, Adam and Maddie and trip with us to the Historic Dockyards at Chatham. The Dockyards have been around for over 400 years and played a crucial role in supporting the Roayl Navey in the defence of Britain and the develpment of the Empire and Commonwealth (I am not trying to be brainy here I just copied this bit out of the book we bought!!!). We went into a submarine called the HM Ocelot that was commissioned in l961 and retired in 1981, from the outside it looked enormous but the inside was narrow and very cramped. As for the sleeping toilet and washing facilities, they were very very basic and I would not have liked to have been aboard it for more than the 30 minutes we were on it. The hatches you had to go through to get to all parts of the sub were small (look at the picture) for me this wasn't a problem but for the tall people like Jamie and Colin it was not very easy. There was one ship there called the HMS Gannet that Jamie and Colin really wanted to go on, it was built in 1878 and there is a picture of it with Jamie and Colin standing alongside it. We weren't able to go on it as there was a couple getting married on it and was out of bounds until late afternoon. Jamie is so like Colin in her imagination, you could see the pair of them re-enacting what would have happend when the ship was out to see at war in their minds. We had a lovely day and will definately go back to visit all the bits we missed.
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