Big day today. After a suitably late breakfast left Portsmouth and cruised down to Portchester Castle which is on the other side of the harbor from Portsmouth itself. My first castle hooray!! Originally a Roman fort and built upon by the Saxons and Normans and used as a prison in the 1800's. Spectacular keep with constructed walkways and an apparently original winding stone staircase fitted with a rope to assist the imperfectly balanced. Winchester for lunch, pan fried fish, in a 1700's pub. The Cathedral was inspiring, brilliant and beautiful with lots of military references. The staff at the Cathedral had heard of Toowoomba from the news bulletins about the flooding in January. After that a quick visit to the military museums just north of the old city gate. I concentrated on the Greenjackets museum, with the various generations of rifle regiments which started in the Napoleonic Wars, and featured in a heap of Bernard Cornwell novels. Yesterday I spent time on the old HMS Victory in Portsmouth. A truly marvellous vessel for it's time, built in the late 1700's, an was Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar and for the years leading to that great thrashing of the French and Spanish fleets in 1805. Anyway here in Salisbury I am in the Mecure White Hart Hotel, a stylish Georgian building with no airconditioning, well appointed however. It has been a warm afternoon. Dinner was over the road at the Cloister with good food and beer (coolish). It's 9pm and still not yet dark.