You know how I said the motorways are good? They are, but it gets a bit confusing from that point onwards. There are three sets of roads that are important enough to be given numbers: the motorways (M), the A roads and the B roads. A roads are similar to state highways in NZ, and range from three lanes in each direction, completely separate, to half a lane winding through villages. You can't establish this from the map. When trying to plot a route between two towns, given a map book, Tom will pick a nice direct path on an A road, but it's a lottery as to what kind of road it will be.
We drove past Rodbaston in Staffordshire. The ghost of Edgbaston is everywhere. We also drove through Loxley on the way to Nottingham; that's where legend, or the new BBC TV series that no-one really liked, has it that Robin Hood is from.
We suspected we'd find demolition in Derby; we also hoped to find dinner and somewhere nice to eat it. This was our first experience of the British take-away chipper (you want to put vinegar on my chips? Why?) Derby has a river flowing through it, but you can't actually access it anywhere: Pride Park isn't a park, it's a stadium. Parking isn't available for less than 1 week and 10 quid, and again, the one-way roads aren't adequately signposted for idiots like me.
The road to Nottingham was a nice big A-road. We had booked a hostel but had no idea where it was, so we needed to find some Internet (thanks again to the national wireless ISPs "Belkin" and "Linksys" for providing me the facility to talk to you all). Even with two sets of instructions, we ended up 5 miles further up the road than we needed to be before turning around.
Tags: travel
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