england #12- the countryside -we head for Sawley

We bid farewell to London bright and early on Sunday Oct. 24th, to start the Next Leg of Our England Adventure. Well, we bid farewell to our hosts bright and early, and sadly, because we really did love staying there. It was a great location, and the only slight drawback was the fairly long walk to the tube. Which was a very slight drawback and there are buses everywhere if the tube walk is too much. I think it was about a 20-25 minute walk to Stratford station. It took us several trips to figure out exactly how to get there and by then we’d quit paying that much attention to how long it took. As much walking as we did, that was nothing. And we loved the house and the cats and our fantastic hosts. I’ll be happy to pass their info on to anyone planning a trip — we booked it through AirB&B. Our host has been mostly renting to long-term students and is trying to branch out – we were her first AirB&B booking, and the second to actually arrive (the others came during the summer, after we booked but before we arrived.) Anyhow, it was a great set-up. It was like getting to really live there for a week – SO much better than a hotel. Certainly much cheaper. And we got to pretend to be Londoners!

ANYHOW, since we couldn’t walk that distance with our luggage– certainly not with Suitcase From Hell, unfortunately drug back out of the closet and re-packed, minus 20 pounds of clothes Kim let our host have to take to a donation place, but STILL very heavy and very very awkward — we called a cab and rode in style to the tube. After the Hellish Tube Trip the previous week, when we arrived, we’d tried to think of ways around Kim having to carry that thing on the tube again. Including her just getting the Heathrow Express train and me taking the regular tube and meeting her at the airport (we had arranged to pick up our rental car at Heathrow). We didn’t want to both take the Express – it was REALLY expensive, although on the plus side it also was REALLY fast. Being the Express. But we’d still have to take the tube to whatever station you switched to the Express. And a taxi all the way to the airport would have been a fortune, even split between us. So we ended up just gritting our teeth and taking the tube the whole way.

(I tried very hard to talk her into just getting rid of that suitcase and buying another smaller, manageable, saner one. Even shipping it back to her friend and buying another one. But she couldn’t bring herself to ditch it —and also was too worried about money to just buy a new one. And wouldn’t let ME buy it and pay me back later. Or not at all. it would have been worth every penny).

Luckily it was Sunday morning, so not packed like it is on the weekdays. Still, it was pretty crowded, probably because so many of the lines are closed for repairs on the weekends. And we had to change at Piccadilly for the line that goes to Heathrow. Which meant Kim had to maneuver Suitcase From Hell down an escalator. We already knew that was a nightmare from the arrival tube-trip. But weirdly there seemed to be very few elevators in the tube stations. We looked, couldn’t find one, so no choice— escalator it was.

I think it was this one — I’m not positive, I took this at a different time, but if this isn’t Piccadilly, it’s very similar in length and steepness.

Kim told me to go first, so she could arrange herself and Suitcase From Hell as best as she could. It was actually very similar to this scene, in that there was nobody going down (THANK GOD, as it turns out) but quite a few people going up. So I start down and she stays up at the top, trying to get Suitcase From Hell situated. I look back up at her when I’m about halfway down…. and there’s Suitcase from Hell, broken free and tumbling end over end, coming right at me! I foolishly thought, “oh, I can stop it!” and nearly got my leg taken off. So I just let it continue its journey to the bottom of the escalator. Again, thank GOD nobody else was below me! Everyone on the other side, going up, was in hysterics. At least we provided some amusement. It WAS funny – I actually started laughing when I saw it tumbling towards me, although I quit when it hit me in the leg. Poor Kim was not amused. She was yet again near tears thanks to that horrible thing.

The rest of the journey to Heathrow was not as dramatic, although of course we still had problems getting it in and out of tubes and shuttles. And a little problem getting to the Hertz rental place from the airport – we kept going to all sorts of wrong places before we finally found the shuttle to Hertz. Still, we made it by a few minutes after 9, which was when we’d arranged to pick up the car.

At that point, I was getting pretty nervous about the whole driving-in-England thing. I hadn’t been giving it too much thought till then, other than, “oh, it will be FINE! It will be FUN!!!” but as the moment approached when I’d have to actually get into the driver’s seat of a British car which is opposite the driver’s seat of ours, and drive on British roads which are the opposite side of ours.. well, coupled with the Renewed Suitcase Trauma, I was nervous. Very very nervous. I’d reserved a Mini, because it was the cheapest car we could get and I’ve always wanted to drive a Mini. But at the counter they tell me they’ve upgraded us to the next size car. I started to say, NO NO NO NO!!! YOU WILL NOT UPGRADE ME, I WANT A MINI!!!!” But I’d also been kind of concerned about that suitcase. Fitting into a Mini. Because Mini’s do not have much storage. As in any at all. They’d upgraded us to an Iziba. {Edit– Ibiza, not Iziba.}

I’d never heard of an Ibiza, and as it turns out, it is also a teeny little car. But bigger than the Mini. And we just barely got that damned suitcase into the Ibiza’s trunk. So it probably would not have fit into the Mini, not with our other luggage. (And that’s our Ibiza there- it was SO CUTE!!)

In retrospect it was probably a little bit insane to reserve a five-speed. When I’ve never driven in England and would already have to be using all my concentration to stay on the right (or left, in this case) side of the road. And not wreck and kill us. My rational when I reserved it was I’m much more used to a manual than an automatic, and much more comfortable with a manual. And it was cheaper! The British are VERY into conserving resources. When we got into the car and tried to drive away, I killed the engine. Like five times. I puttered around the lot a little bit, killed the engine a few more times, puttered out the gate where you have to stop and show your paperwork so they’ll know you’re not stealing the car, killed the engine yet again. Thought, “I can’t do this!!! I’m just going to have to go back in now and see if I can trade this for an automatic.”

Then we got out onto the road that took us to the M4, and before I saw anywhere to just turn around and go back, suddenly I had the hang of shifting. The Ibiza was a diesel, and I don’t know if they shift differently, but this one shifted WAY later than the cars I’m used to. So I’d been shifting much too early. Once I realized that, I was okay. And I’m sure having to use my left hand took some getting used to also, although oddly I didn’t consciously have a problem with that. It could have contributed, though.

Well, I was okay except that I’m driving on the opposite side of the car and it is amazingly hard to judge how close you are to things that are on the passenger side, and I kept getting WAY WAY too close to stuff over there, like, oh, other cars. And giving poor Kim heart failure. Repeatedly. And she was so valiant in trying to stay calm and tell me calmly I was getting awfully close to that great big truck right beside her, and not, oh SCREAM. And I was driving on the wrong side of the road! Although that was not really an issue, not yet, since luckily we got on the M4 almost immediately — I don’t think we were on the secondary road from Hertz for half a mile — so we were ALL going the same direction and I didn’t have to think about staying in the correct lane to avoid a head-on collision. Other than of course there the left lane on the interstate is the slow lane, which I didn’t realize until I got honked at a few times because I was creeping along in the fast lane.

SO, no problems there, at least for awhile. I’d brought the GPS with me, and bought a UK map chip for it – and that was one of the best purchases I have EVER made. I’ll just say right now that the GPS was fantastic and we wouldn’t have seen a fraction of what we did without it. We’d have been lost the entire time. Even with road maps, in a foreign country it was SO much easier to let it guide us. It became our new BFF!

Not so much the first day, though, because we didn’t have the exact address of the marina. Well, we DID, but it wasn’t an address with a road number, like our addresses are. Just Sawley Marina, Long Eaton, Nottingham, and the postal code. And I will just go ahead and admit that I was BACK HOME before I realized that DUH, the postal codes are unique to each address. Ours are too, if you put the whole nine-digit one in, but we usually just use the five digit ones and they are for whole areas. SO if we’d put the marina’s postal code in, it would have taken us right there.  We never could figure out why we didn’t go exactly to where we were wanting to go. We always got close enough to follow signs. Well, we usually did. And there were a number of things that were actually in the GPS as attractions, like Avebury and Stonehenge and the Uffington White Horse. But, I digress!

It’s about two hours from Hertz to the marina. We left Hertz at about 10, so figured we’d get to the marina around 1, considering we’d have to take a coffee break at some point. Kim’s check-in stuff said we needed to be there by 2, so we thought we had scads of time. And we actually did make good time for awhile. We stopped for coffee and a snack — they have these fantastic roadside service areas on the interstate, where you can find food and gas and restrooms and all sorts of stuff, all in one spot, instead of doing like you do here and getting off an exit onto another highway to find it all in separate locations. That was REALLY handy. Especially since they all had either Starbucks or Costa Coffee. And very clean bathrooms. Being so new to the British Driving thing, we had to sit there while I drank my coffee- ordinarily I am a total drink-coffee-while-driving sort of person, but no way was I attempting that the first day. And in fact I never did drink coffee and drive both. But anyhow, we stopped for a coffee and bathroom break en route but it didn’t put us far behind.

What did put us behind was getting off the interstate (the M1 by that point) onto a smaller road- the A453. That is when things took a bad bad turn.

And this is taking so long that I am going to continue the Saga of Our Journey to the Marina tomorrow. I have nothing but time — it looks like we have a foot of snow out there now. It’s still snowing. So, stay tuned!