Cambridge; Saturday, 19 June, 2021

When I’d booked the hotel, it was still touch and go as to whether we’d be able to travel within England, and the hotels website wasn’t offering Breakfast as they weren’t certain what the rules would be, so I hadn’t booked anything. Thankfully the hotel is directly opposite both a supermarket and a café, so rather than having the limited buffet that the hotel was offering for quite a high price, I headed over and grabbed some things from the supermarket and a cup of coffee and had breakfast in my room.

Breakfast over I wandered the short distance to the bus stop for the open-top tour. I picked up the first tour of the day and did a full circuit before staying on and catching it back round to the centre of the city where I was in time to hop off and visit my first booked museum of the trip – the Zoology Museum.

One museum down I popped into the centre of town to grab some lunch before wandering back past a few of the colleges down to the Polar Museum, housed in the Scott Polar Research Institute – founded in memory of the explorer who died on his way back from being 2nd to reach the South Pole. The museum isn’t particularly large, but they do manage to pack a lot into their exhibition space.

After taking in the museum I picked up the open-top tour and caught it back round to the Museum of Cambridge, only to discover (after a quick check on Twitter), that the museum had been forced to closer earlier in the day due to a shortage of volunteers, so instead I wandered back in towards the city centre and allowed myself to be accosted by one of the many people touting punting tours on the river.

You can hire a punt yourself and punt your way up and down the river, or you can get a professional to do the punting for you – which makes the chances of ending up in the river (as we saw twice on the tour) much less likely.

All of the tours take the same route along a stretch of the river from Magdalene Bridge to weir at Mill Lane and back, but it is probably the most important and picturesque part of the river with 8 colleges, backing onto it – including the best views of the Kings College chapel.

Tour completed I had a bit of a wander through the centre of town, taking in some more of the sites and colleges – although all were still closed to visitors in part due to the covid and in part as the final term of the year had only finished the day beforehand.

I ended up back at the open-top tour bus stop just as the penultimate journey of the day was arriving, so I hopped on that and caught it back to the hotel where I freshened up before popping out for a bit to eat before an early night.