Viva GPS

When I last blogged, we were still in London. The next day we took the train to Heathrow Airport and picked up a rental car, a lovely Nissan Note. Will try to post a photo of it. We headed to Oxford but forgot to charge up the laptop which had the GPS antenna connected. Very difficult to navigate without GPS in the UK! It took us several hours to drive to Oxford when it should have taken one. We got a nice tour around the ancient college town from our Chicago friend Mike Mason, who is studying abroad there. After another two hours trying to get out of town, we drove to Bristol for the night and sadly had to skip Bath.

The next day we had GPS but no power connection for the laptop, so we got Gloucester and the laptop died in the middle of what we like to call a "sheep road". The countryside was very beautiful but we wondered if we would be sleeping in a barn that night. We slopped our way back to some paved roads and decided we had to skip our two stops that day, Church Stretton and Liverpool, and just drive straight through to Hawkshead in the Lake District. After deciding that we were totally helpless without GPS, we stopped in Birmingham and bought a AC/DC converter for the laptop at an electronics store called Maplin's. The clerk said he thought we had "western" accents. Wild west?

Things went a lot more smoothly on the drive after the GPS was working reliably. We arrived in Hawkshead around 9pm but we could sense the beauty of lakes and the land underneath the darkness.

I'm in Edinburgh now and my Irish friend Andrea just made us breakfast, so this post is to be continued. Photos here.