The scenic route

There are those for whom life without a Tom-tom is unimaginable (other brands are available); those for whom downloading routes from a computer site makes their lives considerably easier; the old fashioned types who study out-of-date atlases, pour over B' roads in the hope they may provide an easy link between motorway A and B; and then are the few who, like me, know that such and such a city is north or west of my start point and head on out. How hard can it be?

Occasionally I jot down a few road numbers, or key cities I need to be passing, even the street name of my target sporting venue (usually the cause of long-distant UK trips). It works, mostly. Last week,I found an old cathedral town in the south of the country without much recourse to pulling in at lay-bys and on Sunday drove to a town in the north-east without a navigational pause - until we ended up outside a building supplies merchant that happened to share the same address as the budget hotel booked - when in doubt, double round the roundabout and you'll find the hotel hidden next to the plumbing warehouse, - worked a treat this time. Yesterday, I found my way through an ancient cathedral town (yes, another - not a deliberate theme), past throngs of would-be undergraduates and to the required university campus and appropriate car-park. I might have known it was too easy.

Suffice to say that our return trip took in parts of the country that we definitely hadn't passed on the way up!  I marvelled at how easy the 'stay on this motorway until signs indicate otherwise' policy was working. And then it occurred to me that, although it was a journey of some distance and I couldn't be expected to remember each and every set of roadworks, there weren't any, nor had there been for some time. And isn't Lincoln to the east of Nottingham rather than the west (good to know that a degree in Geography comes in handy sometimes)? Those signs asking me to slow to allow tractors to cross certainly weren't there on the previous day, and why acre after acre of potatoes rather than the trees of Robin Hood's hangout?

We stopped for sustenance and headed off again. Linking motorways were missed as my navigators (luckily neither hoping to study cartography) failed to find my scraps of paper in time; and then forgot to mention when they had. We exited one motorway, found an excellent A road and traversed beautiful countryside at speed and joined another motorway. Our exit junction - didn't exist, entrance to the motorway here only. Anxious to face due west and feel the sun on our faces, we persevered with As and Bs on the map, found Coventry, at which point a text was sent to say, 'Birmingham - ish' in response to queries for our whereabouts.

It was time for bells to toll by the time we arrived home; but we had seen hills, plateaux, rolling fields, woods, windmills (old and new), power stations, animals of all sorts, mining towns, derelict industrial units, fields of vegetables, farm shops, we'd gone past castles - and by-passed huge cities without knowing where they were. Now I'll have little to do to convince my two passengers that the city we had visited is only a short flight from here!