The Great North Road

We left Skipworth common just after 9am. We all had a good nights sleep until around 6am when the temperature in Wanda seems to be at it’s coldest. Even Ella got cold and plonked herself inbetween us to get extra body heat.
We started off on the A19 heading towards the M62 and from there we were heading south to pick up the A1.
A few junctions before joining the A1 we left the M62 for a small village just outside Blythburgh where we filled up with Diesel before diverting through the back lanes and on the A1 or as it commonly known The Great North Road.
There is nothing great about the great north road atall. It is a duel carriageway that runs from the south to the north of the country and it wasn’t fit for purpose when they originally built it so to compensate for the flow of heavy traffic they built the A1M which is just as bad if not worse because it goes from 3 lanes down to 2 and back to 3 again at various long stretches along it’s entirety. On both roads if there is accident it pretty much means a road closure and today was no exception.
No sooner had I joined the great north road when we saw a traffic update on TomTom saying a 2 minute delay that within 30 seconds had jumped to a 6 minute delay then another minute later it jumped to 18 minutes.
Fortunately TomTom also gave us an alternative route and soon after joining the duel carriageway we left it and headed through the back lanes and country roads running parallel to the A1. We could see the traffic backed up and it must have been atleast a 10 mile tail back and I was glad we had just managed to avoid it.
12 miles later we rejoined the A1 the other side of the closure and it was eerie experience driving on a duel carriageway in broad daylight with no other traffic and it stayed like that until another 2 junctions and 20 minutes had passed. Then it was traffic as usual.
We didn’t make any more stops and decided to do the whole 250 mile journey in one hit and luckily there were no more hold ups, but the last hour of driving was murder as we were both very hungry because we had skipped breakfast.
Just after 2:30pm we arrived home and Ella was super pleased and flopped straight on her bed. She didn’t enjoy motorhome life.
We emptied Wanda of our belongings and food and parked her back in the drive. It took us over 2 months to get her that dirty when we were in Europe now we’ve been away for a couple of days and she is black.
I don’t think we will be motorhoming again in the UK anytime soon. The rubbish on the side of all of the motorways disgusted us and makes us ashamed to be British. The roads are also in a state of disrepair in the whole country and you really notice potholes in a motorhome. We didn’t really feel wanted anywhere we went with height restrictions on car parks and time limits at the car parks we could get in and we had no where to fill up with water, empty the toilet or grey waste without paying £25-£30 staying at a campsite. Most of which are closed at this time of the year.
We will definitely be sticking to Motorhoming Europe where Wanda is welcomed.Read more