A wonderful majority of my friends and family spent January 20th at protests against the inauguration of Donald “Cheeto McFuckface” Trump. I’m currently living in London, and found myself unable to march with my grandma and grandpa in Boston, or with my big sister Katelyn in D.C.

So, instead, I went on a little pilgrimage of my own.

I’ve been interested in cryptology - the study of codes and ciphers - since I was in high school. At sixteen, I started writing sections of my diary in Pig-Pen Code because I suspected my little sister was reading it. (She wasn't. I'm just an overly anxious woman.) And in England, just an hour outside the city, lies the Mecca for cryptography nerds.

In the 1920s, the British military set up a small, ramshackle base outside the country town of Milton Keyes, in a series of huts around a mansion (pictured above) for the express purpose of intercepting enemy messages. Perhaps most famously, during World War II the village was tasked with breaking the German code machine Enigma, so the British could see where the next Nazi attack would be and stop them in their tracks.

The hushed-up village, full of scientists and code-breakers, messengers and engineers, was called Bletchley Park. In 1992, the base became a museum.

On the train to Bletchley, my friend Veronica and I played Gin Rummy, and I thought a lot about my family. My mother, who told me about her co-workers crying in the teacher’s lounge the day after the election. My father, anxiously watching the news every morning. My little sister and brothers, only eighteen and fifteen and twelve. I wondered if they were watching McFuckface's inane babbling speech. I wondered if they were scared.

Bletchley Park wasn’t your typical military base because it wasn’t staffed by your typical military soldiers. With most of the country’s young, able-bodied men off fighting in foreign theaters, the British government searched for code-breakers in universities and in those who did a particularly excellent job on that Sunday paper’s crossword.

The result was a facility built on meritocracy. Dozens of female recruits and men cast aside for active duty because of their eyes, feet, or mental illness, set to work on deciphering where the Nazis were going to hit next. They were the kind of people Cheeto McFuckface hates and mocks. And who earned their vital job by working harder and smarter than he ever could. Google, who helps pay to operate the park today, is quoted in the front hall of the museum, saying "What mattered was what a person could do - not their gender, sexuality, religion or any supposed eccentricity. By removing these artificial constraints, Bletchley Park brought out the best in the fullest range of talent."

I couldn't ask for better weather. There wasn't a cloud in the deep blue sky, and the grass was still crunchy with frost under my boots. On a hard, horrible day, when the world felt ourselves taking ten steps back into the past, I found myself, literally standing in the middle of a place frozen in time, feeling calm.

Because I was standing on ground that Mimi Galilee, at only fourteen years old, ran back and forth on, delivering secret messages from hut to hut. Without ever going onto higher education, she worked her way up from messenger to clerking for the park's director, all the way to communications manager at the BBC.

Veronica and I stopped for a danish and coffee, in a café converted from one of the huts where Alan Turing did the same thing, with his mug chained to his desk because someone kept throwing them in a nearby lake. (That’s completely true). Turing developed the first rudimentary computer while working as a mathematician at Bletchley. After the war, when the government arrested him and chemically castrated him for being gay, he just started studying his own body, publishing seminal reports on mathematical biology and HOX genes - all before DNA was even fully understood. (Benedict Cumberbatch also played him in a movie, and not everyone gets to say that.)

After my snack, I spent a long time looking at the bombe machines, which were operated by Mavis Batey, the daughter of a postman and a seamstress, who became a bilingual code-breaker when she was one in the first wave of women allowed to pursue STEM subjects. In December of 1941, she broke a message coded by the Abwehr Enigma machine, previously thought to be unbreakable, discovering information that led to British victory in a little battle called D-Day. And she was only twenty years old! And then she wrote a bunch of books about botany, had three kids, and lived to be ninety-freaking-two!

Through Mimi, Alan, and Mavis’ work at Bletchley Park - and please know they are just a few amazing people I’m highlighting among the many - it is estimated they have shortened World War II by three years and saved fourteen million lives.

Progress often can’t be observed day-to-day. After the war, everyone who worked at Bletchley was told to burn their work and never again speak of what they had done there. It remained a government secret until the 1970s. There will always be men who think they can stand above everyone else and wreak chaos for their own personal ideologies, comfort, or sick enjoyment. It can seem hopeless and futile and deeply, deeply unfair to have to toil away in the shadows or shout on the street in an effort to stop them.

But there will also always be places like Bletchley and people like Mimi, Alan, and Mavis. I'm so proud to still be standing. Because not it's mine and each one of your jobs to do our part, just like they did, even if we can't always see the good we're working for right away. As President Obama said in his farewell speech, “Yes we can, yes we did.”

And as Alan Turing said, “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

Yes, we did. Yes, we do. Yes, we will.