Bletchley Park

We arrived at Heathrow in the afternoon on May 17, cleared customs, collected our bags and picked up a rental car. I had been a little stressed for a while about what it would be like to drive a right hand shift car in UK traffic. That Saturday was really the worst of it.

It wasn't the operation of the car itself that was very challenging. The Skoda we rented was a nice, perky little car that was perfect for this trip. The hardest part for me was participating in traffic, especially where I didn't have access to GPS navigation, understand what I should expect from road markings or how to handle roundabouts. Maybe it's a common problem for new drivers in the UK or maybe there's a specific term used for a "Jetlagged, confused US driver muddling through a UK roundabout". In any case, it seemed to take forever for us to extricate ourselves from a modest side town we got lost in (Northampton) and find our hotel.

And then I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat about my credit card's damage cover for our rental car and how stressful it could end up being to operate it safely in various sized cities. (It wasn't...within a few days it started being pretty smooth and even fun)

On Sunday, our main objective was to visit Bletchley Park, which we were fortunate to do. It was a deeply fascinating place for a cryptogeek to visit! This is the place where Germany and Japan's toughest cryptosystems were cracked during World War II.

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This is the Enigma, the German machine for encrypting messages that is most well known.

THE memo issued by Winston Churchill that made it a crash priority for the British government to give Bletchley codebreakers the resources they needed.

Also fascinating were commemorations indicating the general appreciation for the work done there and a feel for what life would have been like there.

A fascinating device used to make the experience come alive for visitors was that a number of rooms had a closed loop film projector showing scenes, like this codebreaker looking for cillies or operator mistakes that would weaken the cryptosystem.

Motorcycle dispatches and cars fitted for mobile communications were also used by the British government during the war,

Behind Bletchley Park is the National Museum of Computing, which also had some fascinating exhibits.