Je suis arrivé

A journey to see CJ and Jo usually takes me two days.  I leave Eagleton on the early morning ferry (that means getting up at 5am which I’m usually happy to do providing I don’t actually have to do it) and arrive on the mainland about 10am.  Then I have a 460 mile (740 km) drive through a combination of the wild Scottish Highlands and miles and miles of motorway.  Much of the motorway driving is both tedious and very full of traffic.  I don’t do the drive in one day these days because it is neither a pleasant experience nor, with the traffic, a safe one as I get towards the end of the journey and am tired and my concentration is lower.  So I usually leave the house in Eagleton at 6am on day 1 and arrive at CJ’s at 5pm the following day.  But I will have had an evening with friends on the way down.

Apart from a very brief period some years ago there have never been flights between Glasgow and Liverpool and the train takes for ever with one or two changes.  I recently discovered that there is now a flight from Stornoway to Liverpool advertised by Eastern Airways.  I couldn’t believe it.  I does go via Aberdeen but it only takes 3 hours.  So I can now do the journey in about 5 hours door to door.  In fact yesterday by the time I’d picked up the hire car and negotiated the Liverpool rush hour to get to the Wirral it took nearly 6 hours.  It did mean that I saw Wendy off on the morning plane to Edinburgh and then had the morning to pack and sort things out before Pat took me to the airport after lunch.  I was with CJ and Jo for dinner.

As Punch would have said “That’s the way to do it!”