It is better to travel in anticipation...

We always aim to get away on holiday at 6.30am and usually manage around 7.30. Today, we decided to leave at 7.00. It was a good call. We left at, er, 7.30.

It's a long drive to Wales but pretty good fun. We usually stop for breakfast at Abingdon before hitting the M74 but I wasn't sure if we would today. Struan and Ruaridh were both snoozing after end of year/end of job parties and I thought we might push on. But Struan woke 5 minutes before we got there and Ruaridh woke as I was driving onto the roundabout where we had to make the choice between motorway and Starbucks.

The human mind is extraordinary.

After breakfast, we drove and drove and, er, drove. Occasionally, we stopped at a service station but the people you meet there can be quite weird...:

...so we just got back in the car and drove some more.

And then we arrived at Ivy Cottage, our Cartref oddi cartref in Wales and got settled in. This is our eighth year in Mumbles and our fifth in Ivy Cottage. Bliss.