The Wheels

Sunday was a follow up day when it came to touring Cambridge. A bunch of Mason students and I got tickets for the Hop on Hop Off bus tour, which runs a number of large double-decker red buses around the Cambridgeshire area. The attraction of the bus was that along with giving a tour of the area (free ear-buds let you listen in on the auto narration) you can get on and off at as many stops as you like, and the ticket lasts the whole day.

The bus tour was great, it took us all over the place, including a number of places in the Cambridge area that, because of their distance from St. Cat's, we had never had the opportunity to check before, including an open air swimming area. (You can see the green outer perimeter just below)

There were a number of other interesting sights as well, and the tour narrated them quite well.

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We then hopped off for the Cambridge Botanical Gardens. The gardens were very nice, though it offers no real contest to my home's Bronx Botanical Gardens (then again, what is?).



We stopped by a smallish, but interesting, greenhouse before we headed out. The group had to pause on the way to the exit, the girls had gotten distracted by a (apparently) stray cat that was wondering around. We had to wait a bit to catch the next bus (they came every 20 minutes).

We then headed over to the American Memorial that was on the edge of town.


The memorial was very serious, and very pretty. I had been surprised to learn that there even was such a memorial here on foreign soil and I was even more surprised to find just how elaborate it was.




On our way back, we got a nice view of the Cambridge University Library, a copyright Library, one of three in the UK that can get a copy of every published book. Also, according to our tour, it is notable in having a full collection of Playboy Magazines! ;-)