Adventuring Abroad: Bletchley Park

My parents returned from Tblisi on a Tuesday evening, and on Wednesday morning we launched back into sight-seeing! We headed over to Bletchley Park, which is about a 40 minute drive from our house. If anyone has seen/heard of "The Imitation Game" -- a movie that came out last year (?) -- it was set at Bletchley Park and some of the scenes were actually shot there. It is the real-life location of the UK's Government Code & Cypher School, which was responsible for cracking several essential German secret codes during WWII. Most importantly, Alan Turing created the machine that cracked the Enigma code. The school's efforts shortened WWII by an estimated 2-4 years and saved countless lives. No one in the public *really* knew what was accomplished there until the 1970s, as the people who worked there were sworn to secrecy.

Sidenote: I watched "The Imitation Game" before going, and again after -- and it's definitely a good film to watch! I really enjoyed seeing the back room of the mansion, which is where the scenes in the "pub" were shot for the movie. They kept the room set up as it was for filming, which was fun to see/walk around in.

The museum is a bit expensive, but we were able to get 20% off tickets with our English Heritage membership, and the tickets are good for a year. So we may be back! We toured through the visitor's center, grabbed lunch, then went to various other structures on the property (named "Block A," "Hut 3," and other unimpressive names) to learn about Turing's "bombe" (the name for the computer that broke Enigma) and see a demonstration. There are a lot of interesting interactive modules to learn more about how seemingly impossible it is to break various codes/code-making machines, but it was relatively crowded (even for a Wednesday during the school year) so we didn't get to try each one. It was definitely interesting material! Hopefully we'll get back to use our passes again sometime this year.