Dom Davis (The Blog)

I know you’re all¹ dying to know if we made it back OK and I can happily say we did. Despite dire warnings of severe weather, predictions that this was going to be the busiest weekend for travel of the year, and stories of various motorways that we needed to use being closed the journey was, in fact, for the most part quite boring.

Starting off was fun. There was only a couple of inches of snow but the road we were on was an infrequently travelled B road which may or may not have been gritted, but was certainly very snowy with lots of ice in the tracks made by vehicles that had proceeded us.

On our journey up I had discovered that I drove down this road far too slowly for the Welsh, who proceeded to flash me, bully me and generally be a nuisance until they could overtake me. That’s fine, but it was dark, icy and I didn’t know the road so I was sticking to 40 on the bendy bits. On the way back even the people in four wheel drive vehicles seemed to accept my choice of 20-30mph with nary a complaint.

5 miles into the journey we emerged from the B road to an A road. The tracks were wider and were devoid of ice, although on sections where it was dual carriageway only one lane was passable. Still, improved conditions and less windy roads meant speeds could creep up to 40.

As we hit the M54 the slow lane was pretty much clear. Speeds increased to 60, although some people had decided that this wasn’t enough. One moron in an 4×4 pulled out into the snow and ice covered fast lane and tried to overtake. They got as far as accelerating, skidding and scaring the crap out of themselves before meekly pulling in behind me again and letting me set the pace.

By the time we hit the M6 the roads were clear and 70 was both perfectly possible and safe. The roads stayed like this until Thursford where we made a stop of a few hours to see the Christmas Spectacular² before heading home. During the show the snow had begun falling in Norfolk so the final part of the journey was again done slowly and with care.

Personally I enjoy the challenge of driving in icy and snowy conditions so the 30 minutes or so it added to the journey wasn’t an issue for me. I suspect it would have been if we were stranded for hours not moving but thankfully we avoided that. Not sure the same can be said for some of my friends though.

¹And by all I am, of course, excluding those I’ve already spoken to… and those who’ve read Facebook… which leaves 1 of you I think.

²Well worth going. You’ve probably missed out on 2010, but if you book early for 2011 you can get good seats.

Today it’s beginning to sink in that there are only a couple of days until everything kicks off. Tonight I started packing (well, I took a load of new clothes that I’d bought for the holiday from the bags on the floor and put them into the suitcase along with a few other clothes) which is always a good sign that you’re about to go away. Tomorrow, I have been reliably informed, will involve cleaning the house. I will, of course, help¹, but will probably mostly get underfoot. Friday we’re off to the Windmill and then it’s all go. There will be a period of time between returning from the Windmill on Sunday and leaving for our salubrious² overnight accommodation before being packaged into a pressurised cylinder and shot half way round the world³ which can be used for finishing up the packing but I thought it might be useful to get the drop on it.

I’ve also packed my camera. This is not as simple as it sounds as it’s not just the camera that needs to be packed. There are lenses, flashes, chargers, cable releases, cleaning items, tripod mounts, tripod heads, filters, batteries, and God knows what else in the three (yes, 3) camera bags I have. Every single piece of equipment I take will need to be carried, all day in the heat and humidity, on my back which means that I had to take everything out and decide what I really wanted to take and what I wanted to leave.

I also had to consider which camera bag to take. The choices were my trusty backpack which I usually use and my new slingshot. Not a simple decision as I had to weigh up size, ease of access to the camera, weight distribution and comfort. After parading round the bedroom with the fully loaded bags on my back I opted for the slingshot. I hope this isn’t a decision I regret 1 hour into a 3 hour hike into the jungle

Sunday will now be a question of get back home, check the passports, pack the clothes that are currently in the wash, check the passports, transpose the toiletries from the Windmill bag to the holiday back, check the passports, check the tickets are packed, check the passports, double check the hotel is actually at the airport we’re flying from, check the passports, double check we’ve got all the holiday information, check the passports, program the satnav, check the passports, check the tickets are packed, check the passports, load the car up, check the tickets have been packed, check the passports, check all the holiday details are packed, check the passports, head off to Heathrow, possibly stopping along the way to check the passports. Nervous? Me?

¹ For a given value of ‘help’

² For a given value of ‘salubrious’, it is, after all, a hotel next to Heathrow so my expectations are set low

³ This will be the longest flight I’ve ever done. While I used to love flying when I was younger the older I get the more I dislike it. I spend the entire flight just waiting for the thing to drop out of the sky which is not conducive to relaxing. Anyway, I have my happy pills, which help, and I have 5 longish flights under my belt from the engagement holiday so hopefully it wont quite be the terrifying ordeal that it perhaps would have been a few years ago.

Today The Zozo and I went for lunch at a nice pub in Holkham which I thought we could also combine with a trip to the beach there given it’s supposed to be one of the top ten picturesque places in the UK. What we hadn’t counted on was the weather being a bit damp and very cold. Fine for a drive and a meal inside, not so good for walking along beaches. The decision was made that we would simply drive down the access road to the beach, see what parking was like, turn round and head home. Simples

Meal finished we headed to the car where I faffed with the TomTom doohicky, pluged the phone in and fired up the TomTom app, pulled out of the carpark, crossed the road, drove 5 meters down the beach access road only to discover you need to pay the man £3.50 to go any further down it (it does include parking for as long as you want so it’s not so much of a swizz). The choice was either cough up or turn round and since The Zozo already had a tenner in her hand I guessed we were heading onwards and… well, onwards really. Ticket in hand we completed the last 1/2mile of the journey down the dead straight road and parked up, took the iPhone out off the doohicky, put the doohicky away and got out for a walk (well, we’d just paid to park there, we weren’t going to turn round and head out just yet). All in all it took longer to sort the satnav out, assembling it and dissembling it, than the entire journey. Perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered

So today I had to pop into Norwich to go collect a load of polystyrene blocks¹. Since I’m not so hot on navigating around Norwich centre I just plugged the post code into the iPhone and got the TomTom app to navigate me there. Given where I was going was close-ish to the station I had assumed that it would take me the way it took me when I went to the cinema (also close to the station), but I was wrong. Instead it had me hang a left down a road I’d never been down before and go down some of the smaller Norfolk roads. This in itself isn’t a problem but I did manage to stuff up a turning (I turned right instead of bearing right) and ended up going down the smallest road ever, bracketed at each end with a sign saying ‘Mud On Road’, although ‘Mud Road’ would be closer to the truth. This is where the fun started.

At every turning into a field, (and there were a few) the mud became several inches deep which was worse than driving through thick snow as the tires kept sliding into the ruts and trying to follow them. Deciding that if I hit any of these patches at speed I’d end up in the field I backed off the speed and slowly pootled down the road at a crawl.

Next up was the white van. It was clear he wasn’t going to pull over so I was forced to slowly reverse half a mile to a passing place so I could let him pass, before slowly heading off again…

…only to meet someone else at almost exactly the same point. Deciding I wasn’t going to do the whole reverse and come back again I rather pressed the point of them moving only to discover there was a passing place just 50m down the road. Grrr!

Tiny roads navigated I started getting into suburban Norwich and then found myself having to go left onto the main road. Now this was a Sunday and traffic wasn’t too heavy but I was stuck there for 5 minutes until someone crossed at a pedestrian crossing just before the junction, mercifully stopping the traffic and letting me escape.

Deciding I didn’t like this new route² I just ignored the instructions for the first part of the journey home forcing it to take me the more usual way. Much better, and this time when signs said ‘Mud On Road’ the road was wide enough for two cars to pass and the ‘mud’ was nothing more than a couple of brown tractor tracks stretching a few inches onto the road.

¹for sitting people on when arranging them for portrait photography if you must know

²The TomTom does some kind of clever thing where it works out routes based not only the roads, but also average traffic conditions so routes can change depending on the time of day, or day of the week

I was under the impression that weddings were these hideously complex, fantastically expensive shows where the veneer of ‘The Perfect Day™’ was spread thinly round the climax of months of grief. Thankfully I am wrong, or more to the point our wedding isn’t going to be like that.

Tip number one for a stress free day is a small venue. Why pay for a large venue that will cost a fortune and increase the likelyhood of one or more of the guests having a drama when you can have a smaller venue that is every bit as lovely (if not more so) and much cheaper. Less guests mean less cash, less worries with seating plans, not having to worry about things like a top table, dance floor, DJ, etc. All in all A Good Thing™.

Tip number two is to phone the registrar on a day distantly removed from any where they may be moving office or any other such activities. Admittedly I failed with this bit, choosing instead to try to phone them on Friday just as they’d finished packing up to move office. Monday they were closed and Tuesday (today) the finally opened at a bit before 10 but were unable to secure my booking because they needed paying and the card machine wasn’t up and running. Given we’d found the perfect venue on the perfect date there was no way I was letting any bugger nick our spot so I jumped in the car, drove to their office and booked in person. I’m hoping that will be the most stressful event of the whole wedding planning process (I’d rate it about 0.4 on a stress scale of 0-10).

Tip number three, and one I’ll be sticking to rigidly, is that although there is a maximum number of guests we don’t need to invite that number. If anyone who is invited is not happy with any of the arrangement we’ll cheerfully uninvite them and put the money towards the honeymoon.

So the date is set, registrar booked, venue booked, photographer sorted, makeup sorted, dress in the process of being sorted, suits sorted, flowers paid for (but need to be sorted), cake is pretty much sorted. All that’s left to do really is choose the menus and say ‘I do’. Got 9 months to sort that out