A little bit of knowledge

[Suff]

Does not always help.

On Friday I was heading to the parents to complete my Christmas present to my father and install his new flash hard drive on his notebook. Just as well as he would have had a hard time with the way the Notebook kept going to sleep, however that’s another story.

I left work at 6:20PM. Later than I had expected. I checked the web before leaving and it said the M25 was blocked both ways from the A3. In the end I decided to go into London and round the south/north circular and head out the M1.

My memory of the route from the A3 is rusty at best. I drove over the M25 on my way in and thought it was a better move as the M25 was a car park in both directions.

I came off the A3 too early and wound up in horrendous slow moving traffic. Eventually I finally got back to where I was supposed to be and that was also horrendous slow traffic. Satnav in these circumstances are useless so I headed off into Thames Ditton on a vague inclination and finally made my way into Kingston down the river on a quiet road.

In Kingston I managed to miss my turning and spent 5 minutes getting back round the ring again. In Twickenham I wound up in the wrong lane and was pushed further East than I wanted to go forcing me to miss the Sion lane turnoff and because I didn’t recognise the roundabout I wound up heading for the A4 on the 316, which I had not intended.

Finally after crawling over the A4 interchange things started to move better. It was quicker to hanger lane then the 406 was quite smooth to the M1. Up the M1 past the M25 and fog and mist. Lovely.

Then I found that the A421 (which I had used three weeks previously going south signposted M1) is NOT signposted as A1 or North until you get past Bedford. However, after that it was pretty easy. I arrived just after 10pm which was not that bad in the end.

My faulty memory was of some use but had it been functioning fully I would have saved myself at least half an hour of crawling around obscure parts on the way to London…. Still, in all, I guess it is a decade since I was driving the roads but it was no consolation when I was driving…

If I have to do this again I’ll leave earlier…