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Published: June 20th 2017
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Friday, August 3
This was a long day because the Olympic Games venue that I
was visiting is 120 miles from London
– a 3 hour trip each way by train. Weymouth
is a summer vacation town to the west and south of London
and which is the sailing venue for the games. According to the military museum
located there, the beaches are so “user friendly” that it was thought that the
Germans would land here if they decided to invade England
in World War II. Also, this was a major jumping off point for the D-Day invasion
of Europe.
Weymouth has the
look and feel of the Venice, California,
beach board walk. There is a long street, the Esplanade, lined with
restaurants, gift shops and hotels on one side and the beach on the other.
Folks can rent deck chairs for a few pounds a day and sit next to the beach
absorbing the sunlight. There is the nice sandy beach where families
were
hanging out.
The city of Weymouth
was running a fair to coincide with the Olympic Games. One could enter a
special area, at no cost and after passing the security check, where a large
screen was set up so that folks could watch the games in the company of others
while enjoying food and beverage from vendors.
In order to get to the spectator area for the sailing
competition, which is located on a; peninsula, one could either walk around the
harbor to the base of the peninsula, or one could pay 1 pound for ferry
service. The ferry was very low tech: a row boat that carried about seven
persons at a time.
The spectator venue was a park around which a barrier was
erected and which cost $70 to enter. Security was low tech: this is the only
venue which did not have x-ray screening of handbags or metal detector
screening of persons. A nice friendly explosive sniffing dog got to do its
thing with the long lineup for spectators. Once inside the venue one could
watch those competitions that were held near the shore – on this day they were
the laser (single person) and 49er (2 person) sailboats. There was a large
screen set up in the open, uncovered spectator area
and another screen set up
in a large tent.
The admission ticket also gave the attendee a one hour long
visit to Nothe Fort which was at the end of the peninsula. This fort, built in
the 1870s, had interesting displays about: (1) military service during the
Victorian era, and (2) details about defenses against the Germans and about the
Normandy invasion. I met a
docent, Lawrence Browne, who served as a scout for the British army stationed
in West Germany in the mid-1960s, and he and I spent about a half hour chatting
about tanks, Land Rovers, defense against a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western
Europe….but not sailing.
After all this it was a 3 hour train ride back to London.
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