14 October 2014 (Tuesday) - Back Home Now

Yesterday evening I mentally prepared myself for a bad night's sleep. The rather noisy young lovers upstairs finally gave up fornicatiing shortly before 11pm, and soon after that the dreadful Bollywood music came to an end. And the noisy neighbours stopped shouting at each other well before midnight.

I got a few hours sleep, but it was amazing how much nocturnal noise was generated in a rather small guest house in the early hours. People were crashing and clumping about from 4am onwards. And after experiencing the melodious farting fanfare from the communal lavatory just down the landing (at 5.30am) I gave up trying to sleep and got up.

I'd been asked what time I wanted my full English breakfast; I'd said 7am. Bearing in mind my experiences so far I walked into the dining room at 7am expecting the worst. There were three sugar bowls round the dining room; all empty. The breakfast... wasn't overly generous and it did give me guts ache.

It is possible I have been just the teensiest bit harsh on the Highworth Guest House. After all is said and done, the place isn't especialy bad; the room I was in was comfortable enough. I can't really complain when I only paid forty quid. What I got was fine; it was just rather disappointing that they made a lot of promises that they didn't keep.

And bearing in mind the incredibly bad standard of spoken English demostrated by the landlady there was absolutely no point in trying to quibble about FreeView being different to Sky TV, or about a sink not constiuting "en-suite" or about the non-existant off-street parking or about the wet used towel or about the rather rubbish wi-fi.

From the guest house to my meeting was only a short drive; but bearing in mind the meeting was at the confluence of several motorways I thought the traffic might be bad. So pausing only briefly to pick up a Midlands geocache I arrived at the National Motorbike Museum a little earlier than I might have got there.

Once at the meeting I met up with a couple of old muckers and we spent most of the day together. I will blog elsewhere about the specifics of the meeting; suffice it to say that I stayed awake for most of it.

I got away from the meeting at 4.30pm; the Sat-Nav told me that it would take three hours (and five minutes) to get home. Including a geo-stop at the M40 services the journey took nearly five hours. There's no denying that this meeting has been rather hard work. Or, to be specific, the meeting was fine; the journey was hard work.

But then I had allieviated much of the pain of the journey by making it into a geo-mission. With caches found in four new counties, two webcam caches done, and a new "furthest north" find, the hours spent in traffic queues on various motorways were far more bearable.

I came home, bandied a few insults with the gathered clans, and then made a fuss of my little dog. We have acquired a cage in which he will (mostly) live for the next two months until his back gets better. He seems quite settled in there. I'm not settled about him being in there though...