Blighty 2025 - Homeward Bound Part One

Leaving a holiday rental is always traumatic. Tidying up, packing, and trying not to forget anything, and all before 10am. We had too many bags, and a couple of them were overweight, so packing and repacking was the order of the day, then doing a kind of puzzle, working out the best way to get the bags into the car while leaving room for passengers. Oh Lordy, holidays!

When I lived in the UK, I never liked driving along the M6 between Birmingham and Manchester. It's always been busy, and always seemed to carry a seriously high density of lorries. In the intervening years, things have not improved, and this despite the previous three lanes each way being expanded to four by utilising what had been the hard shoulder. Well, it used to be three lanes of slow moving traffic, now it's four lanes of slow moving traffic, giving life to the maxim that traffic will always expand to fill the existing road space.

This Wednesday morning was no exception to the way it had always been, wall to wall lorries and speeds well below the posted limit. Essentially, the road runs at capacity most of the time and any little glitch just causes chaos. This morning's little bit of fun was a lorry with a big static caravan on it's bed. The caravan was quite wide, so there was escort vehicle behind it, and in my innocence I imagined that because it was a wide load, it might well stay in the driving lane, that is the left lane, while it made progress. Not so this wagon. It picked up speed quite quickly, and started to pass people on the left, those people who were unwise enough not to drive faster than the lorry with the caravan. You might say that people should always drive in the left lane, and I would agree, but sometimes when you're passing people who are in the left lane, your lane slows, and then you have crazy lorry drivers whizzing up on your left with a wide load and getting perilously close to you. That was bad enough, but then the wide load driver decides the left lane's too slow, and one by one he moves out to the third from the left, and only stays there because he's not allowed in the right lane. So, he's doing sixty-five miles and hour, with a wide load, and squeezing faster vehicles as they try to go past him, legitimately, in the right lane. It only takes one driver doing sixty-six, or a nervous person in the right lane, to slow up that right lane and cause the brake lights to go for miles back, in a chain reaction. Meanwhile, our wide load lorry driver is still thrashing down the road, quite oblivious to the mayhem behind him. Because such bone-headed driving can only be done by a man.

Indeed, all the way to Birmingham, lorries occupied all three left-side lanes, this forcing anyone who needed to pass to the one passing lane remaining, on the right. I think there is a genuine case for lorries to be limited to the two left lanes only, but they don't always adhere to the rule saying they can't use the right lane, so I don't know how far that would get us.

It was a blessed relief, then, to pull onto the M6 Toll, and suddenly see the lorries, and a good deal of the other traffic, simply evaporate. To use that road is £10 well spent in my view.

Once through the construction work on the M42 to the east of Birmingham, and then on to the M40, it all became much more civilised. Sure it was busy, but I was able to drive in the left lane for some of the time, thanks to fewer lorries, which was quite the novelty.

As we approached London, the lady in the navigation system dutifully guided us down through Hayes, rather than directly to the airport, and our hotel for the night. I had it in my head that petrol was expensive around the airport, so set our destination to a Tesco filling station. As it happened, we stumbled upon a Sainsbury's first, so filled up there. I'm not sure how the rented car's fuel gauge worked because after I'd filled up the night before, it showed a range of exactly 500 miles. When I stopped to fill up again, some 200 miles later, it was showing a range of 475 miles. To add to the confusion, the car would only take £36 worth of petrol. A quick calculation made that around 75 miles to the Imperial gallon. While I'm happy to agree that 55-60 miles to the gallon was achievable, I think 75 miles to the gallon was quite the stretch. Anyway, it was still a good return, whatever the actual figure. We'd driven just short of 3,000 miles since picking the car up, and this was only the fourth time I'd put any fuel in. Now why can't North American cars be so economical?

The next stop was the Hyatt Place Hotel, just on Heathrow's northern perimeter. We had booked a couple of rooms for the night so that we could chill out and prepare for an early-ish flight out the following day. Maybe it was an abundance of caution, but we didn't want to be caught in dreadful traffic coming down from Manchester on the same day as we had to get a flight; my stress would have known no bounds. We also elected to keep the car for an extra day so that we could load all our stuff in it and drive it over to T5 rather than trying to get it all on a bus or in a taxi, and that's where the Hyatt Place came up trumps with its sexy underground car park. While the £17 overnight charge may seem steep, compared with some of the fees we'd paid over the past month, it wasn't bad at all.

The rooms in the hotel were small, but probably no smaller than in most London hotels. They were clean and well appointed, and both had a view over the airport and its northern runway, which was nice (although I think we'd paid a premium for an airport facing room). The scary thing was that the room was so well soundproofed, you could see the aircraft taking off 200 metres away, but couldn't hear them! I think the road noise outside also helped because later in the evening when the traffic had calmed down, you could just hear a low rumble as the jets took off. It was like someone had turned the sound off. Needless to say, I slept well.

Wednesday, tomorrow, was to be flying day - hold on to your hats!

Blighty 2025 - Go North Young Man

Given an appointment with the set of TV's Coronation Street, we had decided to spend our last week in England in that Northern powerhouse, Manchester. Car loaded to the gunwales, we set our course for the motorway.

Which was a good idea except that we were stuck behind someone in a little Ford KA car, driving at between 35 and 40 miles per hour, nearly all the way to Warwick. It didn't really matter in that we had plenty of time, but it goes to show that people who don't appreciate that they're not the only ones on the road can be a real pain. Driving like that promotes frustration in others and then they start to do risky things, which is never good. Sure, drive within your own capabilities, but when you have twenty cars backed up behind you, pull off the darned road into one of the many lay byes, at least occasionally. A good read of the Highway Code would help.

The M42 northbound was at a crawl thanks to construction work, but we branched off onto the M6 Toll Road, a congestion free piece of pleasure that skirts northern Birmingham and avoids the M5/M6 Intersection at Walsall. It's congestion free because it costs car drivers a little over £10 to traverse it's length, and lorry drivers considerably more. As an irregular user of that road, I was happy to part with the cash, although if you need to drive it regularly, at your own expense, then I guess it's not so wonderful.

We stopped at the only service centre along the Toll Road, at Norton Canes. I wondered how the owners of such a place would manage with the reduced number of road users, but I found the answer to that question as we left the motorway and discovered that the centre served both north and southbound traffic. It was packed out, too, at noon on a Friday. Tsk. These service centres are not great, although the chance to get out and stretch our legs, and perform other natural tasks, is always welcome. I do struggle with the 30p a litre surcharge on the petrol at these places, though, and wonder who is mug enough to pay it. I bought petrol in Lechlade at £1.29 a litre, at Norton Canes services it was £1.59. That's more than gouging, that's robbery.

Paying the toll on the M6 Toll Road was easy, and something Doug Ford could look at for his highway robbery scheme, the 407 Toll in Ontario. On the M6 Toll, your licence plate is read by a camera as you enter, and again when you leave. The computer does a real-time calculation and presents you with a bill at the Toll Gate, which you can settle immediately with a contactless bank card or phone app. No paper bills, no video fee and no transponders like the 407. Regular users can open a Breeze account and pay online, and at a slight discount, too; again, no paper. Dougie, this is what you need to do.

Back into the real world, and a toll-free motorway, I noted that the M6 has lost its hard shoulder and has four lanes for driving traffic as opposed to three and the shoulder. Refuges are provided every mile or so of course, should you break down. That ought have eased the flow, but instead of three lanes of crawling traffic, it's now four lanes of crawling traffic, thus proving the point that no matter how big you build a road, the traffic will always expand to fill it. Taxes on petrol don't deter people, either, so maybe more roads should charge in order to reduce congestion? A simple but sadly impractical solution, because all the folks avoiding the tolls would just gum up all the free "A" roads. 

Coming into Manchester, the series of urban motorways in the area brought us almost to the door of our accommodation in Salford, although not before having to turn right across what was a seemingly endless stream of cars on a three lanes carriageway. Our apartment has, er, issues, but I'll deal with those in a separate post. Suffice it to say here that the Burger King we snacked at had only kiosk ordering, card payments, and screens like a bank on the counter. Nice.

Once settled into our home for the next couple of days, we searched out a vegan restaurant in Central Manchester, got back in the car and braved the tortuous roads and traffic of this great city. I don't think I appreciated just how central this place was, but it was a chore driving in the narrow streets, and we only really stumbled upon the multi-story car park of Manchester's fabled Arndale Centre by accident. The Arndale is giant shopping mall, but not an out-of-town one, this one is squarely down town, which I guess keeps the core vibrant. The car park was hideous, as they nearly all are here. Seriously low-ceilinged, dark, and with tiny spaces. There was a man from the car wash area relieving himself against a wall, which pretty much sums up the ambience of the place, and it was nearly £10 to park for a few hours. These are the things I do not like about England.

The restaurant was good, though, and the guy serving had time for a chat. He was local and said that he liked Manchester over London because although crazy, it was a level of crazy he could cope with, which was a trenchant observation. We sat and watched the Friday night revellers appear in the streets, young women wearing outfits that covered only the essentials, and men being loud, presumably to impress the scantily clad young women. Don't get me wrong, I'm not being censorious, I'm happy that the young folk feel free to express themselves, but goodness I wouldn't want to be young again these days.

Manchester is a vibrant and burgeoning city, without doubt. It's on the up. But away from the centre, places look battle-scarred and there is a perception that the place is under siege, at least if you look at the graffiti, the urban razor wire and the phalanx of security guards in Tesco. I hope, I really do hope, that the perception is worse that the reality.

Saturday is to be given over to a trip to the East Lancashire Railway, a heritage steam railway based in Bury, just a few miles north of Salford. I'm looking forward to that after the mean streets of Manchester.