Holiday Week 1: Monday: Berkeley-Wombourne-Manchester

Woke up in glorious sunshine, and spent a nice relaxing morning doing nothing (lying within tent and letting the world go by). It was great. I experimented with packing my tent away all as one unit which as opposed to separating the inner and outer - I've not done it before, but others recommend it so will see what happens.

Plenty of roadworks meant a nice lazy 50mph crawl up the motorway to The Old Bush in Wombourne (Wolverhampton), where I met up with friends from school who own it and treated me to a rather tasty chicken and mushroom pie, with lots of chips and gravy. Lovely. It was cool to hang out again (after about 8 years) and catch up, so will hopefully stop by for dinner on my way home :-) I did, however, make I complete pig's ear arriving: managed to reverse right into the carpark wall, across 2 spaces, at a wonky angle, and then beep the horn loudly while putting the steering wheel lock on. Arrival with style it was not. But they certainly knew I was there!

Another trip up the road got me to somewhere in the middle of Manchester for 7.30pm. Mr Tomtom, my new Satnav replacing the lethargic LG with selected memory loss, has been rather reliable in terms of getting me somewhere spot on time for when it said it would. It even popped up a note saying my route included a road thy had just been closed and would I like a diversion? I said yes and then totally forgot about it till about 7pm when the radio informed me that half the motorway I should have been on was closed due to a lorry rolling around, and there were massive hour-long tailbacks etc. So Tomtom:1, Motorway:0

Watched 'The Hangover' with enormous amounts of Chinese duck (pancakes, chow mein, plus with veg and black bean sauce). Stuffed. Funny film, but can't laugh to hard as it stresses the stitches in my lip.

Roll on Friday when I can get them taken out ....