I truly believe that you can sit and listen to the stories of the explorers from the Geographical society for days on end and never get bored. I knew what being an explorer meant, but when it comes to understanding the politics, adventures, betrayal, and all that is still left unknown today; the stories of their lives become so captivating! This is what I learned from our trip to the Royal Geographic society. We were led into a room, sat around a table covered in maps and explored Africa and the struggle of learning where the Nile originated (what body of water did it come out of). Then from the heat of the jungle we moved to the exploration of Mt. Everest and all the preparation that went into the climb, and the people who never made it home though there is some evidence that they did make it to the top.
At some point during this day I completely stopped taking notes because I was hooked on the true stories. All of the maps were what people assumed the world looked like, some were topographic, many copies of the original.
In total they have over 2 million items in their collections, 1 million being maps, planning papers for expeditions, 250,000 volumes of books, and a great many artifacts (some of which they left on the table for us to see)!
Click here to learn more about them! https://www.rgs.org/