Day zero – Home to London
| Distance today – 216 miles | Journey time – 3h 55m |
| Total trip distance – 216 miles | Total journey time – 3h 55m |
The day finally arrived. The best thing about packing the car was that I got to do it myself, and had most of the day to do it. So everything was packed correctly and efficiently, I could take my time to tesselate bags to maximise use of space, and I wasn’t trying to do it with 3 minutes to spare before I had to leave. Excellent.
I picked up Jo from school and we set off to our first stop, staying overnight with friends who live near to London in Woodford Green. That meant travelling along the M62 and then the M1, before a short drive through a very dark Epping Forest.
The M62 was fine at around 4pm, and surprisingly the M1 wasn’t too bad either despite hitting Sheffield around 5pm and Luton around 6pm. The M25 was typically unpleasant, with lots of stop-start traffic, idiots driving way to close to each other, the odd car weaving in and out of lanes at double the speed of everyone else, and cars pulling in front of trucks causing them to emergency brake.
We arrived at just after 7pm, somewhat miraculous timing given we were travelling on a Friday night. I’ll take that. Thai takeaway and staying up until midnight talking, and we were ready for bed.
Why day zero? Because the original plan saw us drive straight from home to Dover until we were invited to stay and visit something special on the Saturday morning…..