England #3 - We set off from London and drive.... in The England Chronicles - May 2017

July 3, 2017, 3:07 p.m.
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To Bodmin! Of course, being Kim and I, we had, ummmm, issues finding the Budget where we were to pick up our rental car on Sunday morning. Well, not in finding it so much as getting TO it - it was right across the A4 from our Ibis Heathrow lodgings, and one reason I picked that hotel was because it’s so close to the Budget. I doubted we could just walk over, since the A4 is a 4 lane divided highway with speeding London traffic and a fence, but distance-wise it was basically right in front of us.

SO we would need to get some sort of a ride over there. {LOL, I am ONLY NOW realizing that the oddly named Hotel Hoppa shuttle that runs between the airport and the hotels is not just a little hotel shuttle – it’s actually run by the National Express, and there are a zillion of them.} I thought there was a free hotel shuttle but turns out there was some free bus that went… somewhere we never did need to go. The Hoppa was the airport to hotel shuttle, and although we’d tried to get it when we first arrived on Saturday, we ended up spending 14 pounds on a taxi from the airport to the hotel, because we’d waited and waited and waited and waited for the #6 Hoppa at the Terminal 2 shuttle area after arriving, as every other number came and went- some of them several times, and Kim’s knee hurt and we were tired and there were a gazillion black cabs right there… so we just took the cab. Then after we checked in and showered and had quick naps, we took the Hoppa back to the airport so we could get the tube into London, and it was not cheap - I think it was 10 pounds each for the round trip, which seemed like a lot. But it was handy, and hellloooo, LONDON.

Anyhow, when we checked out Sunday morning, I I figured the desk guy could tell me if their shuttle could just drop us off at the Budget, but at the same time, Kim was saying the Budget was at Terminal 2 - at the airport. Because she’d called the number she had for Budget, and they told her Terminal 2. And I was baffled because I’d used the address Budget gave her when she reserved the car, and it wasn’t at Terminal Two – it was right across the road from us! In the end we assumed the Budget people know what they were talking about, and took a cab back to the airport, to Terminal 2 (the hotel had its own cab which was about the same price as one way on the Hoppa, and more importantly was right there and we didn’t have to wait on it). Then we spent, oh, A MILLION HOURS wandering around Terminal 2 trying to figure out where the Budget was. It just didn’t make any sense!! Of course it didn’t make sense---- because of course the Budget wasn’t at the airport, it was exactly where I thought it was in the first place!!! And let me just say right here that Heathrow is the size of a small planet, and we must have walked 100 miles trying to find all the things we kept having to hunt for at Heathrow, like the non-existent Budget and the tube and the shuttles etc etc etc.

Apparently they told Kim to go to Terminal 2 when she called for directions because she didn’t specify where we actually were, and they just assumed we were newly arrived to London and were at the airport. And the shuttles from the airport to the car rental agencies are at Terminal 2.

AAGGHH!!! Well, we hadn’t eaten and REALLY needed coffee, so at least once we figured out we were not at all where we needed to be, we located an airport Costa and got caffeinated up. Then we went back to the shuttle area yet again and got the Budget shuttle to the Budget rental location, which was right where we’d started. And took forEVER getting the car, as it wasn’t ready and then we discovered that Kim’s unbelievable deal that she got through the timeshare, $200 for two weeks rental, really was unbelievable as it did not include insurance. Adding insurance bumped it up to more like $500 for two weeks. Which was actually STILL a pretty good deal, and boy was I glad we got the insurance down the road. So to speak. Well, it would be insane not to get it, no matter the cost— in England, you ARE going to bump the car on something.

Finally, FINALLY, we got the car, and really were off for Cornwall!!! Well, we were off for the M4. Which was not easy to find and I kept missing the turns and of course was already pretty nervous about driving. As I said in my initial entry, we’d both gotten a terrible international data plan with 100 minutes of talk time but only 100 MBs of data – which is even less data than I dreamed. I knew it wouldn’t be much, but I figured I’d be using wireless most of the time. I tried to pull up Google Maps and was ALREADY OUT OF DATA and had been charged $25 more for 100 additional MBs that would clearly last about ten minutes. (Verizon had VERY few options and even the sales guy admitted none of them were good plans for two weeks.) Kim was also already out of data. I pulled over into a hotel’s back loading area finally, and got out the GPS I’d brought, which is at least ten years old- so old you can’t update the maps. I’d considered buying a new GPS, but decided it would make much more sense to just use Google maps since I’d never use a GPS again, in all likelihood, and although I expected them to be cheap now, they are not. The cheapest one was $80.

Note to self and a bit of Foreshadowing: Next trip, buy a new GPS. It will be worth it.

ANYHOW, the old GPS hadn’t been used in so long that it was taking AGES to locate the satellite, and I knew it would be totally outdated anyhow, especially around Heathrow, and probably would confuse us more than we already were. So as we sat there Kim changed her data plan to the one that seemed outlandishly expensive - $10 a day for… well, I forget how much data and by the end of the day we’d often get cut off, but it was enough to use for navigation purposes, and we just ended up splitting the charge so that wasn’t so bad. And once Google Maps was up and running we found the M4 fairly easily, and were, at last, headed for Cornwall!

It was, happily, a very pleasant and uneventful drive and took about four hours. We took the M4 to Bristol and then took the M5 to Exeter (looking at the map that seems nuts, and WAY out of the way - but the M roads are the equivalent to our interstate highways, while the more direct A roads go through all the little towns and are slower- and I wanted plenty of time to get used to driving in England again anyhow - no roundabouts on the M roads!) then in Exeter got on the A30 (still four lane and mostly divided), and that went right to Bodmin. It took about four hours, and was a gorgeous drive. Even on the Ms it was gorgeous, and once we got to the A30 and went around the moors, it was just breathtaking. The A30 goes along the northern edge of Dartmoor, and right through the middle of the Bodmin moor – and if you have read Jamaica Inn, by Daphne du Maurier, it also goes right by the actual Jamaica Inn which inspired her to write the book! We didn’t stop on the way to Bodmin, as we’d gotten a WAY later start than we intended thanks to all the Budget Confusion, but the next day we did go back by. It’s maybe ten miles from where we were staying.

I looove maps, so just in case you’re as fascinated with them as I am, here’s our route! The blue one. The grey one is the through-all-the-little-towns route.

I think we finally got to the Lakeview at around 7:30 in the evening. Past check in time but Kim had called and they gave her the code to a box where they’d left our keys, so we found our cottage and unloaded our stuff, and pretty much immediately headed back out to try and find dinner, since as usual we’d failed to properly plan for meals and didn’t think to stop before we got to our lodgings. Which were outside of the actual town of Bodmin. We zeroed in on a not-too-far away pub on Google Maps, which of course we nearly never found because Google Maps hated us and persisted in taking us the most bizarre and roundabout routes, no matter where we were trying to go. (Well, from Heathrow to Bodmin she actually did fine, but everywhere else she tended to be a ConfusoBitch) (We also used the ancient GPS most of the time as well, and it was kind of amusing to hear them bicker about the best way to go, he in his lovely male British voice and her in her annoying American techno-voice. You can tell who I liked best.)

By the time we got to the pub, The Borough Arms… they’d just stopped serving dinner!! Luckily, they were willing to serve dessert, so we didn’t have to drink delicious beer on empty stomachs. That’s what happens to people who fail to plan their meals, kids - dessert for dinner! I had Eton Mess which was wonderful (strawberries, crumbled up meringue, and whipped cream). And a Mena Dhu stout, which was, I think, the only stout I had the entire trip that wasn’t Guiness. Stout isn’t a popular beer choice in England.

SO, I will leave you with pictures!

Our adorable Fiat, parked at a services area. I think I accidentally went into the truck parking area, then just stayed there.

The view from our living room. Apparently I never did get a picture of the outside of our cabin, but it looked like the one you can see the edge of there. And there were windmills in the distance, although you can’t see them in this picture- too dim and far away, apparently.

Oh, THERE are the windmills - it must have been hazy in the previous picture; they were very obvious. There are LOTS of windmills in Cornwall.

Our adorable little car again, parked in front of the cabin beside us which was just like ours so that’s what ours looked like. It was very odd that we had to park in what looked like their area, but actually wasn’t. The cabins were all turned in different directions.

The kitchen and dining/living room area:

The little A-frame houses that were also scattered around the resort. They looked teeny - ours was three bedrooms and three bathrooms, bizarrely, so seemed huge. It wasn’t at all crowded; apparently it’s off-season.