Sat, May 2nd

Well the holiday is almost over. Tiny woke us up at 12:30am with the sound of her throat heaving. I think we had upset her with all the packing we did before going to bed. She had been laying on the bed with me, but ended the night on the chair in the other room.

Anyway, we were up and out early. Well, earliesh. We left The Old Haven chalet around 7:45am after we had downed an authentic saffron fruit bun and cup of tea for breakfast. The sun was in the sky and the forecast was for no rain. If only the drive could be as easy as the one down.

We left Hayle along the A30 which would take us all the way to Exeter in Devon and the M5. I tuned the radio into easy listening on Radio 2 and got into cruising mode around 60mph. Tiny though was unsettled and wandered around the car. Dawn again had to love on her and I had to pull off the road and move the framed picture as she wanted to sit on it.

That done, we continued on the drive east. All went well. Several pee breaks and more for Coca-Cola kept up the progress home. In fact, we hardly even stayed stationary for long. We just enjoyed the sight of thousands of sheep and hundreds of cattle as we passed farm after farm. We did stop a little longer for lunch. We picked up a sandwich once we had reach the M4 motorway and had less than 150 miles left to go.

Sadly, the good time we made on the road wasn't to last. As we got closer to London we saw several signs warning of congestion on the M4 between junctions 4 and 6B. Worse still was that there was worse congestion on the M25 (the way we were going) just after our exit onto the M25. After almost coming to a standstill on the M4, I decided to stay on the M4 and get home via the North Circular and M1. That too proved problematic. Here the volume of traffic was even worse. We crawled along the road from one traffic light to the next. Eventually we reached the M1. Signs telling drivers to use the North Circular to get to Westfield, the largest shopping mall in London, did not help.

To cut a long story short, Dawn suggested that we stay on the M1 and go via St Albans rather than the M25 which we did. This meant that we made it home around 4pm after over 8 hours driving. The whole holiday we had only done 809 miles including the trip to and from Cornwall. Not too bad for these two environmentalists. Best of all is that we both agreed that it was the best holiday either of us had ever enjoyed.

For those of you interested in checking out the photos we took, go to our Facebook and see them there.