This one will be short and sweet as we only had one stop today. We left castles and palaces behind and moved back to WWII and the famous Bletchley Park campus. This was where the code breakers of the war did their work. If you saw the movie, The Imitation Game, this is where the real action took place.
As soon as the war started, England set up the campus at a rundown estate home (built in 1883) here in Milton Keynes. The group started with only about 50 people but by the wars end, there were over 7,000 working around the clock on breaking codes and ciphers. What’s the difference? A code is saying “Bring bread home for dinner” but what you really mean is, “The plane will land at midnight.” A cipher is saying, “sxyrl ekxot cmsit”, when you mean “The plane will land at midnight.”
One of the most famous story about breaking ciphers is the story of the enigma machine. It was used extensively by the Nazis and was considered so secure it was used to send Top Secret messages. What Germany didn’t know is that Polish mathematicians had broken Enigma before the war even started. They made their way to England where they helped decipher messages.
The coolest building was Hut 11/11a. This is where Alan Turing did his work with Bombe. This story is what the movie was about. Of course, it was a drama not a documentary so they didn’t get everything exactly right but it told the basic story.
The reason the Bombe was so important is that it used mathematics to quickly determine how the wires on the Enigma was set which made deciphering messages much easier and faster.
You know how Peter loves to read every word on every card but even he got tired of it, especially since a lot of it was a technical discussion about how the work was done. So we were only there about 2 hours and left.
After finding a Mail Boxes Etc. to box and ship stuff home, we headed to the Peace Pagoda Park to enjoy our lunch in the beautiful sunshine. Well, we got there, found parking, paid for parking and realized we left lunch at home. OOPS. We were going to walk to the lake and see that Peace Pagoda anyway, but it was a longer walk than we thought and, since we didn’t have lunch, we decided to bail.
So, we ended up at Bella Italia (next door to TGI Fridays) and had late lunch there. We were planning on eating dinner there but this is even better as we’ll have time to digest before bedtime.
We’ll hit the road again tomorrow and head for Cambridge where we’ll spend the day before heading to our last stop on this part of our trip. Have a great day everyone.
Is there any lasagna there that actually has lasagna noodles???????? That said, it did look delicious and I could eat it since it has no carbs, but…………
We’ve not seen any noodled lasagna here. In Italy yes, but you would expect it there. Not sure why it’s called lasagna but, you’re right, it has been delicious each time. And, without the carbs, much less filling.