Saturday 6th September                   YORKSHIRE  -  LEIGHTON  BUZZARD

Robyn writes:  We were up nice and early to start the packing, somewhat fragile from last night's excesses. Well, Lex was. Fortunately, I was fine, and after a few coffees he looked quite human. The Pocklington locals are certainly a force to be reckoned with! He has a gift of a genuine beer pump label and also had two bottles from the local micro-brewery pressed upon him. Lovely people.

It didn't take us long to pack everything, then we went in to say our farewells to Patrick and Helen, who gave us a bag of their delicious Victoria plums for the trip. I wish I'd taken a photo of the tree, these plums are just lovely (and I'm extremely fussy about my plums!) We got away at about 9.30 on our way south. The weather was suitably miserable and autumnal - quite rainy a lot of the way and it stayed overcast and misty all day. But it did get up to around 20 degrees at least.

We had a really good run on the motorways today, with not much traffic and no major holdups. A bit of roadwork but nothing too serious. We broke the trip in Nottingham, where we stopped at Wollerton Hall, an early 17th century beautiful grand house set in the middle of a huge estate and deer park. Although it's right in the middle of Nottingham, you have no idea that you're in a big city. The house is now a natural history museum and the stables have been converted into an industrial museum, so we visited both. Nottingham used to have a huge lace industry plus coal mining so there were lots of displays on these industries in particular. We had a lovely lunch in the café there - Lex had a baguette and I had an interesting and surprisingly tasty mint and courgette (zucchini to you and me) soup. It was a great place to break the trip and we spent a few hours there, leaving around 2.30.

Apart from an accident ahead of us in Nottingham (which we were lucky enough to be able to get out of our line of traffic and avoid the traffic jam), we had a smooth run into Leighton Buzzard and got here around 4pm. We were glad to flop in a heap and have a cuppa, but then began the massive task of tackling the huge pile of belongings which needed to be sorted and culled and packed and repacked! Carol now has a huge pile she has kindly offered to take to the op shop for us! There has been much weighing of ports and fingers crossed they'll let us on the plane tomorrow night...