Friday 21st July 2006

After doing a school run and dropping Dingle (the dog) off at her dogsitters, Jan raced round collecting everything needed for the trip and piled them up ready to load up Marvin. Neil arrived and reduced the pile by 50% then started loading the car. Even then, Marvin was bursting at the seams by the time we had everything fitted in.

Around 2.15pm we set off to London and the Docklands Travelodge, armed with directions from the hotels website. Jan was behind the wheel for only the 2nd time but soon got used to going round corners on 2 wheels. We stopped at Watford Gap services for Neil to take over the driving and discovered Marvins oil leak. We then got stuck in a traffic jam just to waste some more time. There wasn’t much we could do about it right there so we carried on towards our destination. As always we got lost and found ourselves at the wrong Travelodge but didn’t really mind too much because UB40 were in concert there so we could study the directions while listening to them. The directions were vague to say the least and had sent us round in a huge circle! We asked security guards for directions but none of them could help us and Jan was soon jumping out of the car and asking anyone she could find for directions. Eventually she collared the police who were there because of the concert and they pointed us in the right direction, even giving Jan one of their maps to help us on our way (or possibly just to get rid of us!).

We eventually found the hotel around 10pm, too late to go to the party the organisers had laid on, so we dumped our things in the room and went in search of food and much needed beer. Before bed we took a walk around the car park and discovered another rally car – team Plan-a-do. We couldn’t see the team anywhere around the hotel so left a couple of our cards on their car (ok maybe more than a couple!) and texted them to say we had seen the car, and then retired for the night.