Day -02 5/30 - 3 Southampton Walking Tours

 On this first full day in Southampton, our plan was to do a number of self guided walking tours using an APP GPS MY CITY.  This is an APP I've used for many years to do walks in major cities all over the world.  There's a free version, but I elect to use the paid version which is available for a nominal annual fee.

We chose to do three separate walks: Historical, City, and Waterfront.  I'll not describe them blow by blow but just comment that they were all really really good.  There is a short written commentary about each stop, so It's like having a guide along. We got to see a lot of history, much of the waterfront and a fabulous little airplane museum near the port (Solent Sky).  The major exhibition piece was a flying boat formerly owned by the American actress Maureen O'Hara.  There were also a number of other airplanes there including a Spitfire.  We watched all of their videos and totally enjoyed our visit there. We ended our tours with a walk up High Street from the Waterfront to the Bar Gate which is called the QE2 mile.  Along that stroll, imbedded in the sidewalk are many historical plaques in date sequential order with the oldest being near the bar gate.  They were interesting to read (sometimes the olde English was hard to decipher!).

While we were down on the waterfront, there was a nice Mayflower memorial and we also checked out how we will walk to the Ocean Terminal on Thursday to board the Regal Princess.  It's a little obscure to find.

Late in the afternoon we stopped at the Red Lion pub and I had chicken wings while Angela had the chicken curry.  The portions were huge and we brought leftovers back to the AirBnB.  In the evening we watched the semi-finals of Britain's Got Talent which was really good.  Before that I did take a short nap, and I'm slowly getting acclimatized to the time zone change.

This town is quite walkable and tomorrow we hope to do all things Titanic and possibly visit an English Costco and Ikea. The weather was clear and breezy at times and excellent for walking.