Tekmos European Vacation

Last month, Tekmos both exhibited and presented a paper (HiTEN White Paper link)  at the 2015 HiTen conference in Cambridge, England.  Travel and especially international travel is a grueling experience.  So we try to have a fun activity scheduled in our plans.  And since the conference was only three days long, all of us took an extra two days of vacation to take advantage of the trip and see more sights.

When we arrived in Cambridge on Sunday, we walked over to the downtown area, and engaged in punting.  Punting is using a 10 foot pole to push a flat bottomed boat up and down the river Cam.  None of us had ever punted before, so we hired a professional punter to punt us up and down the river, and give a narrative of what we were seeing.  Most of the older colleges in Cambridge are located along the river, and it is a very nice and scenic trip.

Being engineers, we had to try our hands at punting.  We were successful, if you define success as not falling out of the boat.  Many of the other boaters were quite inebriated, and would occasionally fall out of their boats.

Later on, we all drifted back to London, and did some of the standard tourist activities, took a river cruise and went up the London Eye, visited the museums, and looked at the Rosetta stone.  And being engineers, we had to visit Greenwich and stand on the Prime Meridian.  After all, who but an engineer would travel 6000 miles to stand on a line that someone arbitrarily drew on the ground?