River Lea

Well it would be fair to say that today was not a fantastic day but we got through it. Got up rather early to get our stuff into bags and clean Nico. That seemed to take a long time and many bags went in the rubbish for odd items of food that we had collected. I think it was nearly 4 hours from getting up until we left. Next stop was a shop to sell our bikes in Brighton. That was a lot of narrow one-way streets, but finally managed it. Next stop was our hotel near Heathrow, by golly I am sick of narrow windy English roads by now. After 2hours of driving we stopped at a petrol station for gas and a steak pie thingey. It took ages as we were on a more main road, and then googlemaps took us off that road onto a smaller road - and that one had 12 mins of traffic holdups. Hmmm, slight road rage might have been building, so I whizzed up a side road, did a you turn in my mini and took off in the other direction. I said to Jody I just didn’t want to be driving up that road. I mean surely there was a main road to Heathrow from the south? We never found it! Also needed the loo as we couldn’t use Nico again as he was all cleaned out. Finally we got to our hotel and there was nowhere to park. So we found an area, and got our bags out. Then a man told us we couldn’t park there. After a few minutes of trying to explain that we just wanted to check in and leave again he then removed some road cones, I drove around the block again and he found us a special bus park. Checking in was easy and then we were off again.

So driving got easy, and we got on the M1 and thought yes plain sailing to the depot. Hmmm not, thanks googlemaps. More traffic holdup, and at an interchange, googlemaps took us off again. We had intended to drop off around 1pm, and the final time was 4pm. By this stage the bitch said we would be there around 3.30, and we still had to stop and fill up on petrol and LPG. Driving around more country roads I was getting a bit stressed. We had to drop off today as we are flying out at 7am tomorrow. So my mini was doing an awesome job hooning around the corners while my headache got worse! Jody then did a great job of navigating us back on the M1, and we found the nearby petrol station where of course their LPG wouldn’t fill us up. It was the station that I had used with Bob, but with the time ticking we decided just to go. And we arrived at Just Go with minutes to spare. Dropping off all went fine. We checked out another model which looks like a great design for a future trip, and then got a lift to the train – phew!

We had wanted to check out London a bit, but were pretty tired, had an early flight and had to organise our bags. So we took a train to Picadilly Circus, walked up to Regent St, checked out Uniqlo (I bought a pair of trousers that I am wearing all the time, and want another pair), then went to Wholefoods for dinner. I was disappointed as we visited the M &M shop to visit the toilets, but they were out of order. No other reason to be visiting that shop! Then we got back on the train to go to our motel near Heathrow, and got there around 8.30.

Oh my golly, then the bag packing began. We could have 23 kgs on our carryon, but they still had to be within the size. My bag expanded so I needed to be careful with that. I think my purchase tally ended up at 23 kgs, but little bags only around 8kgs. We didn’t go to bed until around midnight so it took a while! Alarm was set for 4am – yeeha!Read more