Did not post yesterday or the day before, though it is early morning on Friday and at last I am a little bit relaxed. The last two days have been awful. The bus trip to Swindon was fine, taking a taxi to Herta was fine, but they didn't have the car we had ordered and onlynhad a hue, huge diesel ford galaxy. We took off and promptly got lost (we've bee told since tha Swindonis a nightmare to dire in). Finally stopped and some vey nice people took pity on us and led us through the city (300,000 people) and out to our route. We quickly realized that this car was impossible. Not used to deicing on the left and with the steering wheel on the right, it made it vey difficult to judge the edge of the road and I kept having to tell Jim to "mind the verge". We got lost multiple times, not used to the roundabouts and the way names of streets changed willy-nilly. By the evening we had had multiple close calls and were both frazzled, exhausted, and I had broken down and cried at least twice. We found our B&B and ate at a local pub. Didn't sleep well at all and the next morning it was up at 6 in order to do the dawn tour of Stonehenge, which was quite lovely and worth the effort. More on another post
We were helped by Margaret, the owne o the B&B, who contacted the Hertz people in Shipton, so we drove to Shipton to transfer the car, but they didn't have a small automatic either. Another breakdown by me, I'm ashamed to say. So they located a car in Bristol, 50 miles away
and said we could drive there to pick it up. Bristol is one of the big cities, maybe 1 million people. So, another breakdown. They finally offered to drive our car to Bristol, with us in it, to make the switch. A nice young Polish man, probably about 21 years old, who didn't speak English, drove us there. I'm so glad he did, because Bristol was incredibly confusing. We did swith to a small automatic Ford focus - the very car we had originally ordered two months ago - and we found our way out of Bristol and onto the M5, one of the major "interstat
e" type roads. We had at this point not seen any of the town of Salisbury, nor the cathedral, which was the original plan. We drove to Nailsworth, then Dursley, then Uley, getting lost multiple times and backtracking. I know we went through Nailsworth at least 4 times, getting lost each time. And we finally found Owlpen manor, which was up a one lane gravel track, with no verge and no way for two cars to navigate. At this point we are tired, thirsty, hungry, and short-tempered with each other. Jim kept running off the road on the verge, and I kept getting more an more nervous.
Owlpen Manor was closed for restoration. We only got to walk around the gardens, which would have cost us 4 pounds each, but she took pity on us because at this point it was 4 pm, we hadn't had lunch, we looked bedraggled, and we were!
After leaving Uley and finally getting lost again, another lovely man helped us find our way to Minchinhampton. Honestly, honestly, we would never have found it. At one point we went across a cow ield, where the cows were grazing with NO fence, right up onto the road. It was a series of switchbacks and little winding steep roads with no name.
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