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.
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