July 3, 2018

I suppose when you amass the age of 27 then you’ve reason to think you’re fully grown. This isn’t how your parents view you.

The Favourite Eldest returned from London for a busy family weekend celebrating The Favourite Youngest’s 26th birthday (see below). On Sunday evening she clambered into the Morgan (with some of our surplus party food )for the journey back to the Capital. Ahead, back in London, was a busy week with lots to do.

I steered the car toward Selby to pick up the train. The car was a delight with the hood down for the drive South. Nicely in time we got to the outskirts of Selby to find, inexplicably, that a major road to the nearby motorway, had been shut. This master stroke meant that this motorway traffic was diverted through Selby town centre.

This disaster meant we crawled for a couple of miles to the railway station reconciled to now having missed the 19:22 to Kings Cross. We eventually pulled up to the station at about 19:24. A train was in the station….yippee! Bags were grabbed, farewells were said and Katrina sprinted toward the train. Phew!

I trundled North and got home. I got in the door and Anna received a text saying the train she’d leapt on was the wrong one and going in the wrong direction. Visions of missing key meetings in London flashed before her as well as being stranded in Hull in a deserted station on a lonely Sunday night. Hull is 50 miles to the East of Selby and London is 200 miles to the South. Anna wanted to speak to her as lots of advice or alternatives were available e.g. we’d drive to Hull and collect her, she could get a train from York before 6am the next day and whatever the cost we’d pay, she should leap on any train from Hull and don’t worry about not having a ticket (the Ticket Office was shut) etc.

She had a failing battery life but also explained that she couldn’t talk because she was in pieces. At this point you want to do everything you can to assist your child and takeaway the problem (not least when you’re partially responsible for putting her on the wrong train).

Without doubt she is more than capable of sorting out this misstep but our hearts reached out. As for her emotion then when I asked her the next day if she’d had to pay more then she explained that when asked by the Ticket Collector for her, obviously wrong ticket, she was let off any supplement because she burst into tears. (A tactic I will now employ for all future demands for money).

Anyway changing in Doncaster she got to London and then slowly found her way back to Muswell Hill by public transport and got in her front door at 00:11. Life’s trials.

Overweight people can struggle with exercise regimes. Not something that they want to do, not something they look good when doing and something that can be postponed/avoided. In a field, in our village, I joined many portly men and women in stretching, bending and a little walking. They were undaunted in persisting with this for at least 30 minutes in stifling heat. Their travails were often punctuated by mouthfuls of refreshing fruit.

We currently have ‘Pick Your Own’ strawberries and raspberries in season at a local farmer’s. The customers were not skinny things.

The heatwave continues and after being thrilled about the dry hot weather for a number of days then us Brits are now fretting about drought, dying vegetation, hosepipe bans and sunstroke. I feel however that we should maintain our stiff upper lips in the face of this adversity because… it will rain and be cool and miserable very shortly.

This next month I will accumulate my 58th, 59th and 60th countries visited. We fly to Croatia and whilst there we will drive into Bosnia. Later I will cycle through Slovenia on the way home. Anna will fly home and I will cycle back via Slovenia, Austria, Germany, France and Belgium. My route seems a bit lumpy with the Balkan terrain to overcome and then the Alps! I whinged about my website provider in my last Journal and they don’t offer a very functional blog solution for iPads. I shall use www.tonyives.wordpress.com for regular updates of heroic cycling, surprising natives, gasps of awe at the sight of many beautiful coasts, mountains and towns. I will post on Facebook and also send out some links by email. As always I hope you join me and will be my extra set of gears to help on some of the long days and the 1,500 miles to get home..