At the hotel, at last, after a long second day on our way to Scotland. We arrived in England by way of France and the Channel Tunnel yesterday: a mere 900-odd kilometre drive on the first leg of our semi-regular trek from home to the north of Scotland. This time, we’re diverting from our usual route to visit Aberdeen — a city which has been on my to-do list for many years — before returning to familiar territory on the Cromarty Firth.
Although you’d expect the quickest route from Kent to Scotland to be around the north of London and up the A1M or M1, the British motorway network actually makes a more westerly route the quickest: around the southern side of London on the M25, then along the M40 to Banbury and up the M42 and M6. However: there was an accident on the M25 some way ahead of us and so, in order to avoid the traffic jam, we turned off the M25 and cut through Berkshire to join the M4 instead.
From Reading, Google Maps told us that the quickest route was in fact not the A34 past Oxford — my usual route to the north since I lived in Hampshire many years ago — but via the A419 past Cirencester and Gloucester. So we went that way, stopping for a break at Membury Services, making a quick detour to see my grandparents’ old house for the first time in 19 years, flying the drone above the cloud-patchworked countryside near Stratton, then heading on.
Our usual route through the East Midlands from the M40 takes us on the tolled section of the M6, but our route up the M5 and through the West Midlands took us on the older, elevated section of the motorway past Walsall. This is often a busy section of motorway and so after getting a coffee and enjoying the countryside view at Frankley Services for another short break, we went back into heavy traffic and continued north until we entered the calmer part of the route, between Preston and the Scottish border. After stopping for a cobbled-together dinner from the M & S Food shop at Lancaster Services (which was a lot cleaner and better appointed than our last stop there a few years ago), we sped up a very quiet motorway under grey skies through the hills of the Lake District to arrive at Carlisle. Although we were both pretty tired by this point, the drama of our audiobook (Robert Harris’ “Pompeii”) kept us alert.
The third leg of the journey tomorrow takes us from here to Aberdeen, and we’re hoping for a quieter time of it passing Glasgow and either Stirling and Perth or Edinburgh and Kinross, before we pass through the Angus countryside.
After temperatures in the mid 30s in France yesterday, the cooler temperatures as we head into Scotland are a blessing and we’re hoping for fair weather and to be able to see some puffins when we stop off at RSPB Fowlsheugh and the castle ruins of Dunnotar. It’ll be a full day for sure, but only around 4 hours of scheduled driving instead of the ten hour days we’ve endured this weekend.
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