Blighty Bound - Day Five, Fine Weather

 

We awoke to the now standard fog, but the forecast was for better weather. We had a slow start, but managed to get a batch of laundry done before we slipped out and made our way to the village of Ermington, just a little south of Ivybridge.

To get there we only had get to the A38, the fabled Devon Expressway, and that involves a couple of miles on Devon's ordinary roads. If you're not familiar with Devon, you won't appreciate what Devon ordinary roads are like. I will say that the road near us isn't particularly hard work, there are far worse, but along most of it it's only just wide enough for two cars to pass each other, and for some stretches it's only wide enough for one. There are little passing places, and you may well have to back up if you meet another car coming the other way. To add a little excitement, all the roads are bounded by hedges, it can feel like you're driving in a trench, and there really is no leeway at all when you do meet that oncoming vehicle. The Law of Sod always comes into play as well, meaning that you'll only ever meet things coming towards you on a bend, so you have no advanced notice, either. I'm always extolling the virtues of this lovely country to my Canadian friends, but I do wonder how they'd cope with these roads.

Back to Ermington, and we were on a mission. There's a little business there that will clean up and re-mount military medals, the Bigbury Mint, and we were heading there to drop off DW's dad's old medals for a bit of a spruce up. DW had arranged it all from Canada, and it was serendipity that the Bigbury Mint was so local to us on this visit. Once off the Expressway, we meandered through some Devon roads and Devon villages before coming to Ermington Mill. Rightly or wrongly, I parked near the road, and there was a precipitous slope down to the industrial buildings surrounding the old mill. It was hard walking down, let alone up, and we did it twice because I misunderstood the directions. Anyway, the medals were duly deposited and we set out for Plymouth along the lesser roads. Actually it was a nice little run because, as forecast, the weather had perked up. 

We made our way to Chris' Crafts and Models, in Exeter Road, Plymouth. He's an ex-Royal Marine who has a stock of used, and new, model trains and we were on a mission for young Charlie. Chris is a nice fellow, if a bit of a talker, and we left with a bag of goodies and some GBP350 lighter! Still, there will be a happy little chap in Ontario at the end of the month.

After the model trains, we made the short drive down to Plymouth's historic Barbican, found a very central parking spot and then made use of that UK mobile phone number again by loading the Ring Go parking app onto the phone and paying for parking that way. It wasn't cheap to park there, but it was a perfect position.

We made our obligatory stop at the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) shop on South Street, not only because it's a great charity to support, but they do some fabulous branded merchandise. One of the volunteers there told us about her regular trips to Regina, Saskatchewan, to see her son, so we spent a good deal of time in there and spent another GBP45!

As the weather was glorious now, especially given that it's still early March, we bought chips (the French Fry variety) from Harbourside, and ate them while sitting by the Mayflower Steps, looking out across Plymouth Sound. Goodness, it was lovely in the sunshine.

We had a short walk around the Barbican area, formerly home to generations of mine and DW's ancestors, then made a quick run out to the big Sainsbury's store at Marsh Mills. This was good for a number of reasons, for a browse, to get some petrol, and to use the much vaunted Nectar card that I'd spent so long activating on the UK phone. All things were duly achieved. The petrol was hugely expensive of course, the equivalent of nearly CDN$3 a litre, and more that it would have been last week thanks to the Mango Mussolini's war of choice in Iran. *Sigh*.

We were back home at a sensible hour, and decided on a TV watching evening, catching some old and some new British TV shows. However bad Brits think their TV is, it's a billion times better than most the dross we get in Canada, which is almost all from the USA. Be grateful! Oh, and watching the commercial-free BBC is bliss.

We're back with the  family tomorrow, and a little excursion to Tavistock, another of our regular haunts when we're in the Westcountry. Let's see what the weather does, because two glorious days are almost unheard of these parts.

Blighty Bound - Day Four, Fog.

It's been a dank old day. We set off from Little Orchard in slight rain and mist, and I managed to get the rear wiper on the car going. That's all good in shitty weather, but I didn't know how I'd activated said wiper and therefore didn't know how to turn it off. DW found reference to the problem using a Google search on her phone, and it turned our to be a tiny toggle switch on the end of the right-side control stalk that I couldn't see because of the position of the steering wheel. It's a lovely car but intuitive it's not. It must be the Scandinavian mind because I had an Ericsson phone years ago that defied all logic when it came to operating it. Maybe we've all be become used to Japanese design?

The run to Plymouth was in alternate drizzle then mist, which some would say was standard fare for Devon in early March. It was quite busy, too, but then Sunday has become the big shopping day for a lot of people, and they're all on the road in the middle of the day. 

We did our humping and dumping for the parents, then returned to their place for something to eat and a bit of iPhone and iPad repair. I also set up another store loyalty card on the spare phone, and had pretty much all the same problems that I had endured the day before. Registering for the card, Nectar this time, was a pain as I went through the entire process only to be told there was a problem. Going right back to the beginning, I tried again with a different e-mail address, and this time there was no problem, so I'm guessing that I had used my first e-mail address when I had a Nectar card eons ago. I also had to load the app, and the apps for GMail and Yahoo! Mail so I could verify the processes. Just to make things more difficult, I loaded the Tesco Mobile Pay As You Go app, which also required much checking and verification. But like yesterday, I did win in the end.

We opted to head back home while it was daylight, and it was a good job we did because the fog was worse than yesterday, but easier to deal with during daylight hours. 

We both felt cold, this despite it being around 10-12 degrees Celsius, which is significantly warmer than at home. It must be the dampness in the air, and believe me, there's lots of that.

Tomorrow is a day of tasks, family oriented for sure, but a little more indirectly. Perhaps I can do more on that in a future post. The weather looks to be less foggy tomorrow, but we'll see what actually happens as the day progresses. Snow is a possibility next week, which will be nice...

Blighty Bound - Day Three, The Holiday Begins

 I woke in the night at about 3am and it was totally dark and totally silent. We're not too far from the main road here, but far enough to be away from the madding crowd, and that silence was lovely. It being 3am, I rolled over and went back to sleep and didn't wake again until nearly nine, so a good night's sleep was had.

Our bedroom opens onto a patio and a rising green field, and this fine morning the field was populated by a couple of inquisitive sheep. The cottage's owners live next door and they maintain a pair of bird feeders on the field fence, so we watched the Sparrows and the Blue Tits having their breakfast, which was very nice.

Feeling very much restored, we headed further west, to the family homestead in Plymouth, but not before stopping off at the big Tesco in Roborough. We needed to get some some more stuff to supplement the basics we'd bought the day before, and to get a SIM card for our spare phone. We have a package on our Canadian phones that allows us to use them in the UK at a not too prohibitive cost, but you retain your Canadian number of course. However, we've found on previous visits that quite a lot of things require a UK phone number, hence the UK SIM.

Tesco Mobile does a good deal for GBP10, which is a lot cheaper than the SIMs they try to sell you at the airport. I could have put the UK SIM in my Canadian phone, but it's going to be simpler to have a dedicated UK phone, so we brought an old one with us. I bought the SIM, with the UK number, fitted it in the phone and everything was ticketyboo. 

One of the big things that a UK phone number can get you is grocery store loyalty cards, and the significant savings they bring, so I set about signing up for a Tesco Clubcard. It was then that all my good humour was beaten out of me. A combination of Google accounts, regional issues, and my inability to remember a password, fought me while setting up the damned Clubcard and the app to use it on the phone. I was at the task for the best part of an hour in the Tesco Café while DW did the shopping, and I was at the end of my tether when DW said she'd not been getting my messages. The penny then dropped, I went outside and all of a sudden a heap of e-mails came through and I was able to verify the cursed Clubcard. I had won the battle, but I was ready to kill.

Things improved a wee bit when we paid for our shopping, had the phone-based Clubcard scanned, and reaped the discounts (GBP8.20, nearly the cost of the SIM card) we'd been after. We both felt much better after that.

The rest of the day was spent with family, and the only excitement was on the way home when we hit some pretty thick fog. It was OK on the main road, but on the little lane leading to the farm, about three miles of it, we were down to 10mph and searching for the edge of the road in the murk. Corners and the crests of hills were particularly bad. The unfamiliarity of the route was a big issue, but we kept it slow and made it back to Little Orchard without running off the road. 

Tomorrow is earmarked helping the parents with some humping and dumping, so it'll be off to Plymouth again. Let's hope the fog doesn't make a reappearance. 

Blighty Bound - Day Two, The Arrival

 (That's London City airport, not Heathrow, but you get the idea about a panoramic view of the city) 

I left you as I was peering out of the aircraft window over Ireland, so the next part of the trip was the descent into Heathrow Airport, after the obligatory stacking over Sussex for a while. The pilot had said that the cloud base was low, and we were yards from the airport before we could see the ground, so the weather had deprived us of the panoramic views of London as we approached the runway from the east. Ah well.

Heathrow Terminal 5 is pretty good as airport terminals go, apart from the little transit train that goes from Gates B and C to the arrivals area. It gets very crowded and there seems to be big gaps in the service. You can walk instead of taking the train, but it's quite a hike, so we crammed onto the transit carriage for the short trip. 

At the border, we went though the automated gates without an issue. We'd only just heard about the need for dual-nationals to have a British passport with them, so we travelled on our UK documents this time, and were admitted - to the country of our birth!

Then it was baggage reclaim, and onto the SIXT hire car desk in the Sofitel hotel attached to the Terminal. I'd booked a specific car, but we allowed ourselves to be talked into a bigger and better car, a hybrid Volvo XC-60, at great expense. I have to say that the service at SIXT is always exemplary. The agent we worked with was excellent, and the people at the car pick-up area similarly so, and in what seemed like just a few minutes, we were driving out of the airport and heading west on the M4. 

The car is excellent, by the way, and while it's blown the budget a bit, given that we're going to be using it a lot, I don't mind at all. It's not as economic as a lot of European cars, but still better than all the North American cars I've driven.

We had a couple of stops on the motorway, not least to prevent falling asleep at the wheel, but managed to get ourselves safely down to the big Tesco store in Newton Abbot to pick up some key supplies. Neither of us were in the mood to browse, so we blagged what we needed then made the short journey through the rolling green hills of Devon to Whiddon, and our converted barn, Little Orchard. 

I'll do a separate post about Little Orchard, but suffice it to say, it's very cosy.

Having hauled the luggage out of the car, I sat down in an armchair and slept for nearly an hour. That's what an overnight flight will do to you. But we eventually hit the hay at 9:30, which was only 4:30 for our bodies, but it was dark and we needed the sleep.

It had been a long day and a half, but a successful day and a half, and we both crashed out very happy.

The family visits start tomorrow, so stay with me dear reader.

Blighty Bound - Day One, The Travel

Here we are again at Toronto Pearson Airport, ready for a run across the Atlantic. We're stupidly early, but any travel involving travel on Ontario's Highway 401 requires you to build in some slack.

The aim this time around, only nine months after our last trip, is to visit DW's dad and stepmum, given that with older parents, you never know which trip will be the last time you see them. We're booked into a little cottage near Ashburton in south Devon, about half an hour's drive from the old homestead. Sometimes that little bit of distance can be beneficial.

We'll no doubt get out and about, but our primary aim is family.

I won't be publishing any of these blog entries until we're back in Canada, just to make sure that family stays front and centre

So, back to the trip.

We've spent an anxious few days fretting about travel, thanks largely to the situation in the Middle East. However, everything looked OK for transatlantic travel, so we decided to press on. We always talk about packing lightly, but we never do, so this morning I loaded up the car with THREE suitcases for the TWO of us. To be fair, the combined weight of the three could have been split between two cases, but we tend to bring stuff back, so now have a "spare" case.

We haven't done a road trip in a while, so it was quite a treat to be heading out on the highway towards Toronto, even with the rain. This is the first rain we've had since November, which sounds bad, but precipitation has been exclusively of the snowy variety, so it's not like we've been parched. Highway 401 is a busy road, full of eighteen-wheeler trucks and people ignoring the speed limit. I set the cruise control to about 104kph, to keep pace with the trucks, and was doing fine until one of those trucks tried to pass me. Between Tilbury and London, it's just two lanes each way, so for what seemed like hours, this truck crept past. It started signalling to come into my lane when it was only half way past, and I think that was the driver saying "I've messed up, I can't get by and I'm blocking the traffic, slow down and let me in". Well, I'm all for cooperative driving but this numpty had tried a pass when it wasn't on, and I wasn't going to slow down to correct his mistake. Truck drivers drive all day and they really should be aware of their truck's ability to pass others, and it wasn't like I was doing anything wrong, I was on the cruise control on a constant speed. He did eventually get past, but I didn't fancy being in his cloud of spray for the next twenty minutes, so I passed him and set the cruise a little higher so we wouldn't get into the same situation again. Having held a commercial drivers' licence, I felt fully qualified to not only stick to my speed, but to call him a right knob end. 

We stopped at the Service Centre in Cambridge, and I availed myself of a Tim Horton's coffee. It was fully a dollar more expensive than in a normal Tim Hortons,  but worse, I had to order through an electronic kiosk, and the woman serving the drinks just dumped the cup on the counter and walked away; no order number called, no call at all, and she even covered up order sticker with the paper cup sleeve. I'd paid an extra dollar for that lack of service. I said to another worker that the first one should have called out something, and that worker agreed, but t'was a bit late by then.

Back on the road, we encountered the standard queue of traffic at the airport exit on the 401. Not that everyone was going to the airport, but you have to change highways, and that intersection is right at the point where the "Collector Lanes" join the Express Lanes, so you have multiple lanes of traffic trying to cross. It's always bad there. We also experienced Canada's dislike of informative road signs. There are precious few signs for the airport on Highway 401, and in fact the first one you see is after you get a full, panoramic view of the airport itself just by looking out of the window. You may not like London's M25, but all the airports are very well signposted on that particularly road system.

Then it was on to one of my favourite parts of the whole mechanical process of going on vacation the Park and Fly at the airport. It's run by a private company and it offers three levels of service; park off site and have you bussed into the airport, park on site and have you bussed to the airport, or drive to their site, have them park your car for you, then bus you to the airport. We like the third option, where you just leave your car on their secure site, right by the office, go in and register (or use an app like I did), get on their bus and go right to the terminal. When you arrive back, you let them know when you've landed, get on their bus at the terminal, and by the time you get to their office, your car is sat outside ready for you to drive home. It's long-term valet parking and I love it. It doesn't sound cheap when you look at the prices, $425 for three weeks, but by the time you apply all the discounts (CAA, or whatever) you only end up paying about a quarter of that. Compare that to the cost of parking at UK airports and it's a steal.

We were scarily early at the airport, as I said, but we dropped our bags having already checked in online, and made our way to the far distant end of Terminal 3. It wasn't hugely busy, so we located a quiet spot and broke open the sandwiches. The whole airport terminal, or departure lounge, idea has been changed over the years to provide an array of food and drink outlets, as well as the usual duty-free emporia. While that's not a bad idea, the prices charged at these places are beyond ridiculous, and given that there is theoretically no 13% sales tax, then it makes the price gouging even worse. As a result, we get all grumpy and bring our own food.

I can't remember how many hours we had to while away, but it was quite a relief when they started boarding for our flight early. We had, as has been our trend for a while now, bought seats in the not quite Economy/not quite Business section, so at least we had just the two of us in the row. The aircraft was a Boeing 787, the plastic 'plane, and the seats were OK, certainly better than the ones on the British Airways Airbus aircraft. At least there was plenty of leg room, which is why we choose these more expensive seats.

The flight departed bang on time, but disappointment followed, though, when I found out that the proprietary headphone sockets on the entertainment system didn't like my Bose adapter, so I was doomed to using the rubbish supplied by the airline rather than my very nice Bose version. The offending sockets were also damaged and they wouldn't hold the jack-plug in place, and allowed sound from only one side of the earphones unless I held the jack-plug in place. Then I found out that the touch-screen that was to show the movies and whatnot had a dead area across the top and down the right-hand side, which limited how I could use it. There was a remote control thingy tucked into the seat arm, but that allowed only basic functions. Between the screen and the remote I managed to get most things to work, but not all. I get it, the airline doesn't break these things, but it's disappointing all the same.

Anyway, I did manage to snatch a bit of sleep, although not nearly enough, and I did get to enjoy seeing the sun light up the starboard wing in the wee small hours, though the fancy LCD filter on the window that these 787s use rather than a pull down blind. Sadly, at 40,000 feet, above some dense cloud, I didn't get to see Cork (in Ireland), the land of my fathers.

I will close this entry now, as technically I was in day two of the trip as we flew over the Emerald Isle. There will be plenty more to write up, but so I'll do my best to keep each entry slightly less than the entirety of War and Peace.