The Journey

I remember as if it were this day last week, taking to the high seas at a blustery and bleak Rosslare Harbour. We had risen at 3.45 to fit in emotional scenes with the O'Driscolls before hitting the road for Wexford. In all honesty it was a miserable morning, so it wasn't too difficult to bid the auld sod farewell.

We took our seats in the 'executive' lounge on the strength of a promise of reclining seats. This entailed a saucy £18 upgrade each - not even €! The seats didn't recline but we were afforded some sanctuary from the bedlam below, as 400 punters prepared for the crossing. Also, there was free access to a bar/kitchen area and loads of newspapers.

The captain addressed us with the news that one of the four engines was 'not operational', so the journey would be prolonged. Furthermore, despite the lack of wind ashore, conditions were bad 'out there' so we could expect extreme maritime turbulence, as it were. Sure, it wasn't exactly coffin ship conditions, but it wasn't ideal at the same time. There was a fair bit of seasickness amongst the hordes, including one creature who vomited in our executive kitchen area. The steward told us that it was a 3.5m swell, with 4m being the cut-off for cancellation! He also revealed that he would not be serving food on the return journey...

Entering the UK involved driving off the boat, and as we looked closely for some sort of customs and immigration facility, we suddenly found ourselves on the open road to London!

We had a glamourous lunch at the Services at Junction 26 before crossing the Severn Bridge into England. Now it was a matter of counting down the miles to London. Which was actually a little confusing having becoming accustomed to kilometres. Bloody Brits with their medieval imperial system...

The highlight of the remainder of the journey was spotting the sign for Slough Trading Estate (of "The Office" fame), we even managed to get a snap of it without causing a pile-up on the M4...


The next task was negotiating our way tentatively around the edge of London, avoiding congestion charges, emission charges, police baton charges... The sat-nav (which we dubbed "Nuala" - forgotten why) was initially being used as a back-up to the printed google maps instructions, however when one direction was "go through 5 roundabouts", we decided enough was enough and we entrusted the situation to Nuala. Happily, she didn't let us down and after a fairly painless half an hour, Nuala smugly announced that we had reached our destination. Welcome to Burnt Oak!

We popped into town later for a bite to eat and to meet our official London Greeter, John Enright. And so, we were suddenly Londoners.