Journey to the sea

We went for an extended weekend to Sutton, the daughter and I, to a caravan rented to us by my brother and his wife for twenty quid and a bit of brotherly banter - but I get the banter anyhow, so that’s just the twenty quid, then.

The drive there was interminable - 2 hours 40 minutes the Sat Nav predicted, in lashing rain and Friday home-time traffic, the two lanes of the A46 reducing into one this side of Newark causing mayhem, as the son had warned me it would, and stopping the travel time from counting backwards as otherwise it should've.

“I need the loo,” the daughter said as we inched forward, and we broke our ‘not until at least half-way’ rule to pull into a service station so she could go. She returned with a packet of Murray mints – most likely a 'should buy something' purchase, I thought, though they were most helpful in smoothing the journey on, not least the stretch where the Sat Nav sent us off the main drag and through hamlets with strange names we'd never heard of.

Muddy water from fields alongside cascaded down the single lanes we travelled on, collecting into pools we must ford in the bottoms. A middle-aged man in a Stetson stood to the side of one such flood with his teenage son, and we wondered if there was a reason for this and whether we should stop. But he smiled and waved us through when we wound down the window to ask him, so we did.

Cautiously, we crawled on, fearful of the unknown terrain, of sharp bends ahead and the sudden need to pull to the cusp of ditch-side tarmac built to a cliff-edge by years of re-surfacing.  Disgruntled locals crawled behind us, others sped at us head-on, these back lanes their diversion from miles of tourist-logged main roads.

A diversion that raised our anxiety levels but kick-started the unwinding of the travel time, putting us back on track - literally - and over the halfway mark. The rain stopped, and cresting the top of a hill we gasped to see the sun-flushed Lincolnshire Wolds below us.

“Not long now,” I said as we turned at last onto an A road. “The way looks fair from here.”

“No worries, Mum,” the daughter smiled. “It's gonna be great. Would you like another mint?”

AM