Chris and Greg’s Travel Blog

Cambridge (part 2)

This morning we cycled around this beautiful university city with its canals, cobbled streets & little alleyways. There are 31 colleges here, all with beautiful old stone buildings & churches. At the outdoor market we picked up some fresh berries & cherries which are especially delicious.

The River Cam
King’s College chapel
King’s College chapel
That’s me on the bike riding like Miss Daisy because the brakes on the bike are barely working. 😧 The round church (Church of the Holy Sepulchre) behind me is one of only 4 round medieval churches still in use in England.
King’s College students protesting against Cambridge University giving money from the university endowment fund for Israeli arms.
The Corpus Clock (also known as the Grasshopper clock) at street level at Corpus Christi College. It was conceived & funded by a college member & unveiled by Stephen Hawking in 2008. The clock took 5 years, 200 people (including scientists, Engineers, Calligraphers etc) & £1million to come to fruition. And guess what – it’s not working at the moment!! 🤨
The lobby of The Graduate hotel where we are staying. The chandelier is based on the DNA model discovered by a Cambridge scientist.
Punts on the hotel lobby wall.
The phone in our room.
Cows grazing next to our hotel. We thought they were wearing bells but the device is actually a GPS based invisible fence.
They are very precious about their patch of weeds.
We took a guided punt tour along the River Cam where the Colleges back onto it. Notice all these punts have a girl’s name.
All the guides are college students.

One of the 9 bridges we passed under.

The Wren library at Trinity college.
The Wren Bridge
The Bridge of Sighs at St John’s College is the only covered bridge on the River Cam. Originally called New Bridge, it was renamed by Queen Victoria as she thought it looked like the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, when in fact it looks nothing like it.

We attended this service as we wanted to see the interior of the King’s College chapel which is the largest chapel in the UK & the 2nd largest in the world behind the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican.

It was a truly amazing experience which will never be forgotten. It is a magnificent building with a vaulted ceiling & stunning stained glass windows. It was a beautiful service & the college choir was outstanding, assisted by the wonderful acoustics of the chapel. It felt like we were at a royal wedding. We were seated at the end of the front row so had a brilliant view of the famous painting “The Adoration of the Magi” over the altar. It is a Ruben painting from 1633 but was purchased in 1959 for a world record price of £275,000.

This is a photo from the internet as no photos were allowed during the service.
A great way to finish the day even though the long twilight is hard to get used to.

It is now 10pm & still not totally dark.

Chris Gordon

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