One day last week Charlie and I set out for a trip to the Royal Navy Dockyard at the other end of Bermuda. Our plan was to take the ferry over with the scooters and then ride back. We started out our day running a little late to make the 9:45 ferry ride. However, we ended up scooting to the end of the line just as the ferry showed up. When it arrived, the ferry was packed with people and was taking quite some time for them all to dis-embark. During this time an impressive amount of liquid sunshine dumped on us. We wrestled the scooters on board and got them secured and off we went. I got a little video of some guy kite surfing in the harbor in and out of the sailboats. It was a very nice ride over, the ferry was much faster than I thought it would be. We rode around the North end of Bermuda past Ft. St. Catherine, the fort we toured on Tuesday. We cut inside the reefs and followed the coast along until arriving at the West end docks. We were just about dried from the earlier rainstorm when we arrived.
The Royal Navy Dockyard is a bustling place. There were two cruise ships at the docks and it was packed with people. The whole area is set up for entertaining tourists. There are tour trains, scooter and segway rentals, restaurants, snack places, musicians playing, dolphin shows and all manner of things to do and see. Charlie and I were interested in learning some history of Bermuda so we headed off to The Bermuda Maritime Museum. The museum is on and around the grounds of another big fort (The Keep) and the Commissioner’s House. It was packed full of the history of Bermuda. There were a number of displays that were closed for renovation while we were there but it was still fun. I highly recommend a visit if you are ever close.Next we grabbed a quick lunch at the Frog and Onion then headed over to watch some glassblowing. It was a very interesting process to watch. Charlie and I were trying to guess what it was going to end up being. It turned out to be a very pretty blue-purple colored plate. We never would have guessed it was going to be a plate, most of the time it just looked like a blob of glass. The team of three artists worked well together to create some very cool pieces.
Before we started riding back to St. George we rigged up the GoPro camera on the back of Charlie’s scooter. We thought it might be interesting to get some footage as we drove back to St. George. We had a lot of fun on the ride back imagining how good our videography was working out. We ended up with the camera aiming backwards basically because of a lack of good mounting positions facing forward. As it turns out, like a lot of wacky ideas, it was a lot better on paper than it was in reality. It ended up with just too much fine-grain solid vibration. It was hard to watch and the going backward view was not all we imagined it to be. I included a short segment of this scooter-mounted video as we were departing the dockyards so you can get a glimpse of what the place was like.