Well, we're back.

Last Saturday I spent over 11 hours driving. It felt like one of those mythic journeys. We got up pretty early, gathered the remaining stuff that we hadn't been able to pack the night before, locked up the house, and jumped in the car. We left about 9am. The first half-an-hour was fine. After that it got more interesting.

Essentially we wanted to go west. But every road west was jammed, blocked or just moving really slow. Once we hit the M25 (118 miles of freeway in a ring around London, for those that don't "get" the UK road system) we began to slow down. We tried the M4 for a bit, but the traffic information on the radio got worse and worse. So we left, went south for 20 miles or so to join a slightly smaller road heading west, tried that until it slowed, then went south again to another, yet smaller, road and so on. Each step any direction except west was fine, but as soon as we turned west trouble started again.

It was about 8:30 pm when we finally got to the campsite, and we just about pitched the tent before it got too dark to see.

Here's a picture from the following morning.