200 miles covered
Zero great sights seen
Citroen were due to deliver the car ‘around 9am’ but being a French car delivered by French people on a Monday morning, no-one who was English was very hopeful of this timetable. However despite even the low expectations, time passed. And passed. And passed. At 11am we hear it’ll be arriving soon.
Finally at 1.30pm we get a call; the cars are here and we have fitted our telematics, come down and arrange insurance. We dash off for the riverside HQ of the company to fill out a lot of online insurance forms (I can recommend Aviva for short-term insurance, low price and simple forms). Sometime after 3pm we finally get given the car and can set off on our jaunt.
A word about the car: Originally we were due to drive something called a C5 Cactus, which from the pictures we dubbed ‘the bubble wrap car’, but between summer and October this has transmogrified into a DS5 Hybrid-4. The company have loaded us with enough monitoring kit to make the passenger side of the windscreen look highly suspicious. The car itself has more buttons and switches than Mr Sulu normally gets to operate and is very highly specced, with black and white leather, a full panoramic roof, selectable 4WD, swivelling headlamps and loads of tricksy electronics such as lane guidance. We’re quite pleased. For now.
A word about our route: Whilst waiting for the car to show up, someone suggested we look at a website containing 50 of the best UK places to visit according to a red top newspaper. We looked. About 15 of them were in London or nearby, which is not an ideal place to visit in a car. One is in Northern Ireland (Giant’s Causeway) and another is on the Isle of Wight (The Needles) which are not feasible. We decided that the remaining 33-ish we could have a go at and see how many we could bag. A huge number of the suggested sights were on the south coast, which made us suspicious as to where the journalist who compiled the list might have been born. The suggestions ranged from the specific (Avebury Stone Circle) to the more abstract (The Lake District). Still, it’s something to aim for and will put some miles under the wheels.
So we’ve found the fuel gauge, seen it’s showing nearly empty, filled up with diesel, and now as we’re pushing 4pm, we decide to head south to Bristol for the night. This run down the motorways is pretty straightforward, even through the Midlands round rush hour, and we’re in the city soon after 6pm. Now come the first hurdle – everywhere in Bristol is booked. All the Travelodges, all the Premier Inns, even some of the independents. Either something major is happening, or Bristol has a serious dearth of hotel rooms. Eventually we use a combination of Laterooms and swearing to locate a gastropub that does B&B about 10 miles outside the city, and more importantly they have two rooms free. The only downside is we’re blowing the budget on the first night. We set the satnav to find it for us. It’s at this point that we, or more specifically I, because I’m driving, find the satnav infuriatingly slow in cities. All satnavs are a bit behind where you are on the road, but this one is a lot behind, and the map is crap at showing where it is going to tell you to go. We pass SS Great Britain twice before we finally get spat out of the city centre. But it’s worth it because The Battleaxes in Wraxall, North Somerset is a bit of a find.
Half gastropub, half B&B it’s heaving at 8pm and it’s hard getting parked and it’s another hour before we’re settled in and they have space to serve us. Still, I think we’ve done well considering we only a few hours ago we didn’t even know if this trip was going to come off.