Caravan Travels

09.58am – It’s going home day, sadly. We’ve seen and done so many great things on this holiday, but as the saying goes, all good things come to an end.

Helen is over at the shower-block whilst I’m having my cereal breakfast. It’ll probably be around 11.30am when we drive off this site and head for home.

11.30am – Last jobs prior to hitching-up – rubbish disposal and loo visits!

1.33pm – What a nightmare! Our route home should have been straightforward on a road we’re quite familiar with – the M42 around the bottom of Birmingham. Only after we’d set-off did we discover that a long stretch of the motorway encompassing several contiguous junctions was closed so that overhead bridges could be installed as part of the massive HS2 works that have been blighting the lives of so many people in this area for several years now – bloody pain! This meant that we had to go further North on the M5, take the M6 briefly and the A38 for several miles through a very heavily congested, built-up area of Northern Birmingham. We probably lost an hour, and, to put it mildly, my nerves have been stretched somewhat! Next time we’ll be more careful to check our travel routes home in advance.

However, we’ve finally made it back onto the M42 (beyond the closed section) and are now at Tamworth Services which is a regular stopping-off point for us. All being well the rest of our journey home should be back to normal – M42 onto M1 and back to our storage site via the local roads we know very well. Sixty-nine miles in total.

4.40pm – Fortunately, we had no more traffic/road issues on our way back home. The caravan is ‘put to bed’ on our storage site near Worksop and Helen is just driving us home to Dronfield now. What a fantastic and memorable time we’ve had on this four-week holiday. The things we did at the start already feel like they were months ago!

Roll-on our next trip which will be in August when we go to Barnstones Caravan Site in Oxfordshire for our annual trip to Fairport Convention’s Cropredy Music Festival.