Our drive back to Peterborough was exhausting! Karla and I were half passed out in the back seat of a VW Golf and Brianne (navigator) and Dean (driver) were trying to reverse-read their Internet printed directions to get us back to Peterborough. Unfortunately there were some slight miscalculations and after about two hours, we ended up about 40 kilometers from Birmingham, which is about an hour and a half from Peterborough. Our what-should-have-been two and a half hour car ride was likely closer to four hours, but on the plus side we ended up seeing a bit of the UK country-side (a.k.a. fog), learning some of the road signs and confusing ourselves in roundabouts. Oh, one last thing I’ll mention about this drive… the “oil” light ended up coming on the VW Golf we were driving so we stopped at a service-centre at the side of the road to buy oil. My sister ended up paying £13.99 for 1 letre of oil for the car. I couldn’t believe it… doing a quick currency conversion, that is over $30.00CAD for 1 letre of oil; in comparison, we used to charge $3.50CAD for 1 letre of oil at the gas station I worked at in my high schools days. HA. I quickly learned not to do currency conversions while over there, otherwise I would never purchase a thing.
The date is now December 20th, 2006, mid-afternoon… we are back at my sisters house in Peterborough… Karla and I are even more exhausted… so we went to bed to sleep for a few hours. When the alarm went off close to 6PM, my body was once again angry. So this is what jet lag feels like, I thought to myself. We had a shower, got ready and off to the pubs we went! ha.
The first thing I noticed about the pub we went to was the smoke. Coming from Ontario where you can’t smoke in bars and restaurants, the hazy thick smoke in the pub really jumped out at me. We all enjoyed a few drinks, I had my first UK fish & chips experience of the trip (yum), and sitting there shooting-the-shit with my wife, sister, dean and a very friendly British colleague of theirs Webster, was really quite right. *sigh* Now I felt like we were really in England!
WOW! Great job capturing our trip. That’s amazing. I do have to point out there are a _few_ spelling mistakes, but after writing a 13-page blog, that is expected. I would also like to add to the currencies part of your blog; you mentioned that you paid almost $10.00 CAD for a coke for me, but conveniently left out the fact that you paid almost $20.00 CAD for a rye and tonic water at the disco, which you learned is _not_ a good drink like drunk Matt thought it was on new year’s! HA.
Glad you had a good holiday all in all. Easy holidays that go exactly as planned don’t actually exist… they are just a hopeful dream… so it sounds like you did alright.
Sorry we didn’t get to see you while you were there!
What an amazing story! I’m so happy that you took the time to write it all down! It is definitly a wonderful addition to the pictures (which I haven’t seen yet, but will be heading there next!) All too often people have only the photos, which is great, but it’s always nice to have that extra little bit and write down everything that is still fresh in your memory! Scary conversions and bad hotels aside, I do hope that you and Karla have the opportunity to return to Spain (all inclusive, of course!) and enjoy the things you missed out on the first time! It sounds like you had a wonderful time in England though (minus snotty hotel clerk!) and I was very happy to live vicariously through your tale!
Haha… thanks for the reminder about the Jack Daniels and Soda Water… it was actually 10 Euro’s, which is about $15.00CAD. Yeah, it was expensive, but comparatively not as expensive as your Coke still! haha.
Any who, in-case anyone is interested I finally got my photo’s online. Sorry for the delay… I know I disappointed both Karla and Brianne for taking so long.
1. England Pictures: Click here
2. Spain Picutres: Click here
Hey Cassie & Dom!
Geeze guys, sorry that I didn’t approve your comments earlier… I actually have to approve them at this point because of all the damn comment spam I get. There was over 500 spam comments I had to go through to find these!
Thank-you very much for commenting!
Just another quick test for the comment system.