Edward Gets Road Tested

In early July 2011 Amanda arrived from New Zealand and I was pretty excited, not just to see her after four months apart but also to get Edward on the road to see how he actually functioned as a camper. Amanda arrived at Heathrow and we checked in to a cheap hotel in Hammersmith then headed out for a meal with some friends. We went to a Thai restaurant somewhere in west London. Food in London is usually pretty reasonably priced. Decent dine-in Indian is around £15 a head with drinks. So I hadn't counted on the £250 bill to be shared between six of us. For Amanda and I this meant £85 for a shared starter, a mains each (£4 rice not included), and one drink each. Hell!! $170 nz for dinner. It was good, but maybe not that good.

 

Amanda took a few photos on her Golden Half film camera. They were poorly scanned by some lazy photolab operator when we were in Estonia. Left is Paul and Mems who were pretty delighted with their £30 Lobster, and right is a reasonably plastered Rodgers getting ready to hit on our 'hot' waitress (who was 16 and had a moustache) before trying to pay the whole £250 bill.

Not a great start to our attempts at travelling on a tight budget. Suffering from jetlag and a bank account hang over we returned to our cheaper than a Thai meal hotel and slept the pain away. This was the only nights accomodation we payed for in the next four months.


The next day we took the train to Aylesbury, the town where I had been working about an hour northwest of London, and Amanda finally met Edward. 'It's a bit smaller than I expected'... oh dear. It was a great couple of days for driving. 25 degrees and blue sky. We'd turned off motorways on the satnav so we ended up taking a pretty interesting route towards Edinburgh. One highlight was Claxton, a tiny little villiage in the middle of nowhere near York. It's a personal joke. Something to do with Left Or Right being hackers, having clackers and living in Claxton. As we followed the signs to Claxton we saw some travellers (or gypsies/knackers/tinkers) parked on the side of the road with a sign up offering building and labouring services. A young boy of maybe 10 or 11 was standing there in what appeared to be nappies... that's a hacker. 

Finding a camping spot in North York was a litlle bit of a mission, I think we spent an hour trying to find a nice place to sleep.  We wondered if we were setting a precident for the rest of our trip...? Eventually we just gave up and parked on a farmers lane just off a country road. The actual sleeping part went well. I patted myself on the back for camper conversion success.


Carrying on North the next day we went through a small fishing village called Whitby where we grabbed some bacon rolls for breakfast. Bacon rolls are awesome and cheapish and perfect for an occasional travelling treat. It was already hot and muggy outside. Inside the van with black interior and no air con it became relatively uncomfortable. We found a nice beach just north of Whitby and I had a quick dunk in the North Sea to cool down. I realised it was the first time I'd swum in the sea for over a year. 

About 5pm we arrived in Edinburgh and Amanda got settled into her new flat. For the next month she'd be studying TESOL (teaching english to speakers of other languages) at summer school in Edinburgh while I went back to Aylesbury to try and cash up for our holiday. But for the next few days I was on a break. Amanda was flat out with school right from the get go so I spent my few days in Edinburgh busking, drinking beer and watching Wimbledon in pubs or on tele. Edinburgh kicks arse. I didn't make a whole lot of money busking but scraped together enough for a few beers each day and met some pretty classic local buskers. There are so many in Edinburgh that it's impossible to stand out just playing guitar. I generally played songs by bands from Dunedin, not citing any references in the hope people might think I was a clever songwriter. Some people did, one guy even offered me a spot in a singer songwriters night that week. I had to come clean and tell him that my songs are rubbish, so I was playing my friends songs. Obviously this meant I didn't meet the criteria for singer songwriters night. I gave him the names of the artists who I'd been stealing from and told him to buy their stuff. I hope he did.


One afternoon while breaking a sweat busking in the uncannily balmy Edinburgh summer, I saw a familiar face checking me out. It took a while to click that it was my old band mate Matt Bodman. Bizzare. Matt was on holiday with his girlfriend and here I was playing songs by Tono, who we used to be in a band with. Buzzy times. We caught up over a coffee on the royal mile, and pondered the odds of such meetings. The coffee was forgettable which leads me to a rant on coffee in the UK. It's generally quite average. In New Zealand there are hundreds of cafes specializing in coffee, with barristers working the machines. In the UK there are thousands of cafes specializing in cheap greasy breakfasts and weak arse coffee, employing grumpy old bags with turkey necks that shudder when their jaw drops if I ask for an espresso. It probably wouldn't bother me so much, and I may have never mentioned it if those working in cafes didn't insist on calling espresso 'eXspresso'! What a wanker I am. Getting my whine on. The tea is bangin' though.


While I was in Edinburgh we caught up with our buddies Lilly and Jimmy who were living up the road in Pitlochry. We had a few drinks at their hotel room and went to see a pretty awesome Fleet Foxes gig at the Corn Exchange. The Fleet Foxes avoided most of their boring new crap, and kept the attention of a few thousand standing drunk Scots for over two hours.


So Amanda had settled in and was up to her eyeballs in assignments. I tried to be a good boyfriend and help, but I'm terrible at grammer and all things lingual so the best I could do was cook dinner as much as possible. A few nights in I had to leave Amanda to it and head back to work. Seven hours on the motorway, one stop at BK and a sore rump later I'd made it back to Aylesbury. Edward broke some records. Averaging about 110kph/70mph and using less than one tank of diesel for the whole 750km trip left me pleased. Shame about the price of Diesel, and those carbon emissions....