A long time in the planning, a significant family birthday is our prime motivation for yet another grand tour of our joint fatherland, England. This is a long one, just on four weeks, and is costing not only an arm and a leg, but the foot and the hand as well.
Planning started over a year ago, and we'd booked three weeks in a charming little house in the centre of the Cotswold town of Burford. Why Burford? Well, it's central, it's pretty, and is far enough away from our usual haunts that it makes this trip a little different.
The only trouble was that, a month out from departure and we are on the hook for the full accommodation cost, but we discovered to our horror that the cottage we had booked had been removed from the cottage rental agency's booking calendar, but no one had thought to mention this small detail to us. Given how close this was to departure, and we'd already paid in full for the air fares and the rental car, there was no backing out, and an awful lot of panic on our part. Step up Gardeners Cottage, in the almost as pretty Cotswold village of Shipton-under-Wychwood, just a few miles north of Burford. A place that had all the Burford place had, and more, and was available for the three weeks that we needed it. A quick booking, and a shed load of money, later and Bingo! The deposit we'd paid on the first cottage was fully refunded, naturally.
So, it was a long a fraught morning that we waited at home before setting off for Toronto's Lester Pearson airport and our overnight flight to London. It was fraught because the British Airways computer had decided to schedule a different aircraft and the seats we had paid a King's ransom to reserve didn't exist on the new aircraft. Again, without anyone actually telling us, we had been allocated different seats, none of them close to a window. Sure, a seat is a seat, but why pay a ton of cash for a specific seat and then have it whipped away from you on the morning of the flight? Decisive action was called for, so I put in a claim for the refund of the money paid to reserve the seats; take that BA!
The drive up to the airport wasn't great. The weather was horrible, low cloud and rain for most of it, and of course given the hour of the day and multiple collisions on our route, our four hour journey ran into five. It was a good job that we'd allowed so much extra time.
Check in at the valet parking was simple, as was checking in for the flight, so bagless, thank goodness, we made our way through security and into the vastness of Terminal 3. I've moaned before about the removal of most of the regular seating there, in favour of tables aimed at food and drink service from a number of outlets recently installed. Ordering food and drink isn't mandatory if you use the tables, but I still prefer a proper "comfy" chair and a good view out of the window, both of which were achieved, thank without having to settle for the table arrangement. The food and drink outlets are scarily expensive, as are all of the shops and whatnot in the terminal building; there are a lot of people making a lot of profit from their captive audience, and I object to that.
The aircraft due to take us to London arrived late thanks to the weather, so was late in loading and late in departing. We pushed back about thirty minutes behind schedule, and the aircraft's pilots bolted for the runway. I commented to DW on how fast we were taxiing, and as we turned onto the runway, we promptly turned off it again and parked on one of the runway exits. This wasn't looking so good. After about ten minutes, the Captain came on to say that one of the aircrafts brakes was overheating so they had to wait until it cooled off before making a second attempt at getting to the runway. Curiously, I wasn't surprised at this news. Anyway, at the second attempt we took off, very smoothly it has to be said, and headed east into the night.
The inflight food was OK, in as much as any inflight food is OK. I had Macaroni and tomato sauce, which wasn't too too horrible. Then it was time to achieve the almost impossible, some sleep. The seats on the Airbus A350 are not comfortable, and while dozed through Singing in the Rain, and a Harry Potter audio book, I didn't feel very rested as I awoke properly somewhere over Northern Ireland. We were served one of those odd aircraft "light snacks", a kind of pastry filled with tomato sauce, and to go with it, a very small cup of coffee. It was a strange snack, but we'd paid for it, so it was all dutifully consumed.
We arrived more or less back on schedule in a warm and sunny London, and Heathrow Terminal 5 wasn't too awful. We made our way to the Sofitel Hotel, just outside the Terminal, where Sixt car rental have a desk, and went through the usual "upsell" routine with one of the agents there. On a twenty-seven day rental I didn't really want to be upsold, despite the agent pretending that there was no way our luggage would fit in the type of car I'd already paid for. She set us up with a Skoda Karoq, or "Carrott" as it will be known for the next four weeks, and guess what? The luggage fitted in. Just.
I haven't driven a manual car for a while, but took to it quite easily. You never forget clutch control. Modern cars no longer have a manual handbrake, so I was having to get used to the electric version, and learn to trust it when it released automatically, but it was all fine. Our official route to Oxfordshire had us on the dreaded Orbital motorway, the M25, for a few miles. But this was Friday afternoon, at the start of the schools' half-term holiday week, so the normally busy road was doubly-busy. I opted to avoid the stopped traffic and made for the slightly less busy M4, and a cross-country route, despite the protestations of the lady in the Satnav.
We came off the M4 at Theale, made our way through Pangbourne and Streatley, then skirted the Berkshire downs, took a detour through the village of Blewbury, my home for fifteen years, then onto the A34 to Abingdon, and across country to Witney, just a few miles short of our destination. We were some hours ahead of schedule, so stopped to pick up some supplies at Waitrose, the excellent grocery arm of the John Lewis group. Far from picking up "a few bits", eighty-five great British Pounds later we struggled to fit our many purchases into the already well packed Skoda.
What should have been a fifteen minute drive to the cottage took nearer forty as we crept through Burford in gridlocked traffic, victims once again of half-term Friday. There's a bridge across the River Windrush at the bottom of the hill in Burford, so narrow that it's controlled by traffic lights, and that was the cause of the delay, at least in terms of how the really heavy traffic coped with those traffic lights. I'm hoping that it's not so bad on other days. The slight upside of the hold up was that we arrived at our home for the next three weeks, more or less at the time we were supposed to.
I'll write about the cottage in another post, but it really is a nice place to be, right on the edge of the Cotswolds.
And so to bed. Everyone was dazed and confused after the (mostly) sleepless overnight flight, so tempers were beginning to fray, and I couldn't find the car keys which didn't help the general mood. Still, a good night's sleep will surely sort me out.
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