We had to get up super early to get to the coach park—we're talking 4AM or so. Cramble came along for the ride, really just because none of us wanted to say goodbye, not her family, not me. Before we'd even left Cardiff, we were thinking of the next time. We had to. These past three weeks were the most whole her and I had ever felt.
Heathrow went about the same as last time. My checked bag got stored, we went off to plow through the Underground, check into our Travelodge, and plop down before heading back out for the final day. This time, Caby sprung for one of the deluxe Travelodge rooms in the same Travelodge as the first time, actually. It's partially because we like the familiar, partially because we're sentimental about those kinds of things, partially because the location was great, and partially because it was just a nice Travelodge.
(The deluxe room was, by the way, absolutely worth it. We got hot chocolate, Kit Kats, and a fan. It sounds silly, but man, we were hype. We've decided we'll stay two nights next time so we can have a longer look around London and see more touristy bits of it—the Tower of London, perhaps, and the London Transport Museum looks pretty cool.)
Given that we saw the Natural History Museum on day two, it only made sense we saw the Science Museum this time. As you'd expect, it's focused less on fossils and rocks and more on human advancements in technology—the space race, the Industrial Revolution, old computers (hold that thought). It's also a lot newer and shinier than the Natural History Museum, which is very fitting.
(Last time I'll mention it, promise: the rest of the photos for this trip over on cabycammy.somnol. Tons of shots of model cars and planes, old tech, glassware, and other comforts of modern life over there that didn't make it onto this page. Go browse.)
Space!
Unfortunately, our visit was timed perfectly with every single primary school in the UK going on a field trip to this museum, so it was busy and loud and kinda stressed us out. We didn't stick around in the space area because we were more interested in getting to other exhibits the children hadn't yet gotten to.
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Still! Neat globe thing, neat satellites (I really oughta dig into the space race/Cold War sorta stuff, I find the time period and the aesthetic fascinating). I wish I could've gotten more photos, but there were a lot of kids there, and we just weren't doing it.
Models!
This was the exhibit directly after all the space stuff. It was kind of a whole bunch of shit, really—model biplanes, old vehicles, tiny versions of ships. (Several people also floating around the exhibit seemed to think all the large coal-powered ocean liners on display were the Titanic, so Caby and I made a habit of pointing at random boats we found and calling them the Titanic as well.) I believe this was the "Making the Modern World" exhibit, so there's some consumer electronics (AND A QUADRUPLEX TAPE MACHINE) in there too.
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OLD COMPUTERS.
I knew the Information Age exhibit was gonna deliver, and even in my delirious state, with my heavy backpack filled with CDs and plushies and other garbage weighing me down, I was hopping around in awe and excitement at it. It's my thing! It's old computers! And the Internet! (Well, more accurately, the World Wide Web—they referred to Gopher as a search engine, and I wasn't sure whether to be annoyed at that or amused that they used Floodgap's proxy to represent what Gopher looked like.)
| This is the first thing you see when you walk into the exhibit. A lot of phones and a lot of talks about how mobile phones have revolutionized microentrepreneurship in Cameroon, if the photo is to be believed (wow, I can read the text on one of these!). There were some fakes in there too, which was amusing. |  |
| The classic PDAs and some additional early mobile phones. There was an eMate 300 in another part of the exhibit, next to this absolutely gaudy gold-plated BBC Micro that was part of a competition prize through Micro User magazine. |  |
| This was kind of a puzzling one. Macintosh 128k, excellent, good to see, but there was a boxed copy of Windows 1.0 right next to it. I kinda get it, in the "this is where the two big computer platforms got their start" sorta way, but Windows didn't run on 68k Macs and 1.0 sucked anyway. Very odd way to set it up, but still cool to see. |  |
| Now this was a beauty! An Apple Lisa. With computers all having honestly too much computing power for what they're expected to do today, it's hard to imagine a platform so anemic like the original Macintosh that you needed a much more expensive and powerful computer like the Lisa to write software for it, but that's what they had to do back then. |  |
| If they were gonna have a web design corner of the exhibit, they'd have to have a NeXT Cube somewhere nearby too, huh? I think id Software had one too; I seem to recall QuakeEd and the original Quake dev tools running on NeXTStep (going back to a more powerful system developing for a weaker one, in this case MS-DOS). That rectangular mouse looks painful. |  |
| I was unreasonably excited to see this gigantic wall of home computers. To see the original iMac and the VIC-20 and the TRS-80 sharing space with oddities like the OLPC XO-1 (a low-cost student laptop for developing countries that laid the technical groundwork for netbooks later in the 2000s), love it. Even us American kids wanted one of the Shrek laptops. |  |
A smorgasbord of other stuff!
I'll be honest, I feel like the Natural History Museum was more consistently interesting, but the Science Museum had the higher highs. Here's a grid of photos about some other exhibits that I liked peeking through, but didn't really find interesting enough to give its own section.
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(And that one really is the Titanic!)
Worth noting, while I omitted the photo of it here because it didn't come out that great (it's in the full selection on cabycammy.somnol)—there was a little fake VFX studio set up on the second floor where kids could learn how studio lights and mixing audio for movies and suchlike worked, complete with getting to mix your own audio for some superhero movie (I wanna say Black Panther? I don't recall). I quite enjoyed that, though the computer demonstration judged me picking my preferred music track for the scene as "a little traditional". This is why we need to nuke these AIs before they grow up and start judging all of my editing decisions.
I first thought this was just a funny miniature red Dalek, but Caby's since informed me that's in fact their normal size, and from Googling around, the "New Paradigm" red ones are created from pure Dalek DNA in a device called a "Progenitor". British sci-fi autism is intense.
After a detour through the gift shop (which we peeked at earlier, but didn't buy anything because I simply couldn't fit it into my bag—though believe me, I wanted some of those Minecraft books) to pick up some freeze-dried ice cream (delicious), we headed back to the Travelodge and spent the night chilling out. Her and I were still trying to keep the realization that I'd be heading home tomorrow out of our heads, but y'know, time passes.
All that said, it was a great night spent with more Takis, the demo to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity on my 3DS, and us doodling in each other's sketchbooks. It might've been hard to go, but we weren't about to spend much time at all moping about it.
And I couldn't have done any of it without her.