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Lies, damned lies and traffic jams: Driving to Scotland

August 03, 2010 @ 13:43 By: gordon Category: Out and about, UK Trip 2010

So, my flight from Ottawa to England was uneventful (generally, the best type of flight) and I was even able to sleep a bit. and we arrived about half an hour ahead of schedule. Clearing immigration and customs was the least painless experience I’ve ever had and I was basically standing on the sidewalk within five to ten minutes of joining the queue. Even the baggage retrieval was fast.

I called Rob on my cellphone and he gave me a “talk-in” to where he was parked and we were on our way.

According to all the route planning thingies, the trip from Heathrow Airport to Perth, Scotland takes 7 hours and 10 minutes. The most charitable way we can describe their accuracy, based on our experience, is with the phrase “they lie”.

image We made our way from Heathrow to the M6, which we then followed for most of the rest of our trip. We made a couple of stops for food and gas along the way, but that added maybe 30 or 40 minutes to our journey.

The traffic on the M6 outside Manchester was insane. Clinically-certified insane.

Construction, bouts of rain and miscellaneous chaos – in other words, typical English traffic – lead to us travelling at times at speeds well under 3 miles per hour. This added at least an hour to ninety minutes to our trip.

We encountered rain at various points along the way and then there was still roads works outside Glasgow that further impacted our progress.

We finally rolled into the campsite at about 9:30pm, or about 10 hours after we started on our 7:10 drive.

At the campsite, we found dozens and dozens of geocachers. And flags. Lots of flags.

We set up the tent and called it a day.

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