We were up, packed up and out the door by 10 this morning because I was quite conscious of the very long drive we had ahead of us. We’ve been listening to Serial in the car – very late to the party given the podcast was released in 2015 but it was still just as fascinating and a great distraction during the driving. We did a big chunk of driving straight off, just stopping for a coffee break somewhere in between Swansea and Cardiff. From there we headed across to just before the border bridges, where we turned off to Caldicot Castle & Gardens. This was a gorgeous park with the castle plonked right in the middle. To our surprise, the inner grounds of the castle were open, with a little café serving coffees and people picnicking on the grass. We had a wander around the castle itself, exploring the walls and places where you could see fireplaces and what would have been wooden structures inside the walls. After a little walk around the surrounding parklands, and a minor panic when we thought we’d walked through poison ivy (but I’ve got no rash and I was wearing sandals so it mustn’t have been), we headed back to the car to continue the journey.

About an hour and a half later we stopped for lunch just outside Swindon at a cute little pub. Being back across the border in England, we were able to sit inside – thank goodness, because it started pouring partway through lunch! Sunday lunch calls for a roast, so I chose the pork and Peter had a delicious roast sirloin. It was ages since I’d had a pub roast so it was a nice return to a minor element of normality (if you ignored the social distancing/endless hand-sanitising/one way system in the pub). From the pub it was back in the car and another two and a half or so hours back to our place. The last hour was a crawl through London traffic, edging our way around the ring road outside the congestion zone, to eventually arrive in Shadwell and be faced with the search for parking. After a fair amount of confusion with the parking signs, we realised we could park for free overnight because it was after 5:30, and after a couple of moves, we managed to get the car in a spot outside our apartment! This definitely reinforces my feeling that you would absolutely never want to own a car living in our area of London. We have to drop the car off by 10 tomorrow morning, but given that the parking finishes at 8:30, we’re planning to just get up and take it across then. A pleasant surprise for me when I got back was that my plants had survived the trip! I’d set up fairly involved watering systems for all of them, all of which were empty, but pleasingly they had worked, with all of the plants looking reasonably happy and green. We finished the evening with UberEats burgers and listening to the last episode of Serial!