Christmas trip part 2 - to the Midlands

NB photos of Staffs taken on an earlier winter visit

 I'm writing in the early morning of Saturday 22 Dec in a cosy cottage near Burton-on-Trent, home our son and daughter-in-law Jeff & Fi, and our temporary resting place in England.  We've driven nearly 1500 km to get here with amazingly little difficulty - not only avoiding hold-ups in France but making the journey from Kent to London and then on to Staffs smoothly on quiet roads.  All the more amazing on the brink of a holiday weekend when all reports are of heavy traffic and jams.  They all seem to have happened after we passed!

Our short stay in London with old friends Ruth & Claus was comfortable and warm in every sense.  We had a chance to wander in Highgate village and introduced two sets of friends from different parts of our lives over lunch - if there was a common thread beyond a general enjoyment of culture it was the appreciation of good wine: we'd brought with us wine Gaynor & Ed had bought in Bordeaux during our summer visit there together, and we enjoyed both good Bordeaux red and delicious Chablis with lunch.  I keep straying in this blog into the territory of the wine one!

Highgate scenes

So we set our yesterday from London, aiming for the A5.  This lust be one of the least diverted of the old Roman Roads in the country, once you get onto it north of St Albans.  Of course it has new bits like the Milton Keynes bypass that Romans would have found it hard to imagine (even without the concrete cows) but mostly it passes through delightful undulating rural landscapes all the way to Leicestershire where we turned off towards Burton.  On the way up we stopped for some lunch at a really good raodside pub, the Narrow Boat at Weedon (now we discovered with Motel-like rooms fringing the car park).  We visited this quite often on our trips to and from Derbyshire some years ago.  The grounds are right next to the Grand Union Canal and it's altogether a good place to visit.  We arrived at Jeff & Fi's at 3 pm and enjoyed a cosy evening with a blazing stove, good wine(!) including some excellent Aldi organic prosecco we'd discovered on our last visit and some beautiful pinot noir we'd brought from the Limoux vineyard of Jean-Louis Denois.  A good start to our holiday.