We got away from Portsmouth on time yesterday, having spent most of the day in the Historic Dockyards and, more specifically, the "Mary Rose" exhibition. We left Moray a day earlier than our original plan specifically to do this, and it was well worth the effort.

The "Mary Rose" is/was a Tudor warship which sank in the Solent in 1545 with the loss of most of her crew. The remains of the ship were rediscovered in the 1970's and raised in 1982. These relics tell a truly remarkable story of disaster and reclamation, and the artifacts are as interesting as the remains of the ship herself, and very well presented with background stories, personal items and a fair smattering of forensic investigation. The latter aspect I found particularly interesting as I'm at the beginning of a Masters degree in the subject.

We left Ascot and Mike's mum at 7 am yesterday, expecting to avoid the notorious traffic around the area. We hit the first delay after 10 minutes with a 2-lane queue of traffic trying to get onto the M3 motorway. Luckily we were heading west not east so managed to get past it fairly quickly, but everywhere we went there were queues of traffic trying to head towards the east and London. Really makes us appreciate the relative lack of this "up North". It really seems to be an anthill in the south-east, with everyone trying to get one step ahead of the norm. Mike said the behaviour of the traffic reminded him of the scramble at the Saudi border with Bahrain, with every opportunity to get a bit further forward in the line seized with reckless desperation.

The satnav boldly announced that we'd be in Portsmouth at 0815. We got there at 0940...so no time wasted waiting for the dockyard to open and just enough to grab a quick coffee and fail, once again, to get a wifi connection. Writing this blog may not be as easy as we'd thought.

Mike takes over now...
Sue is busy with her homework while there's not a lot else to do.

Her Forensics course is proving to be more time consuming than she thought and she's had to bring some of it along with a promise that it'll be put away when we get to Spain. I'm glad, though, that the weather is calm otherwise she's have her head, not in her books, but in a bag. I watched the forecast for the last week and hoped the High from the Azores would extend far enough north to give us an easy crossing, and we've been lucky. Nevertheless I've got a lot of barfbags concealed about me, just in case. And, as you can see, the ship's wifi works.

We're due into Santander at about 1730. Sea calm, winds light, no signs of scurvy, crew not mutinous. Poor blog material so far. No dramas, no disasters. Hope that doesn't change. The plan is to get as far south as we can by about 8 this evening then find something to eat and a bed. In that order, after the last attempt.