The Hothersalls. An unexpected Journey: Pre-trip

[Gill H]

It’s a bit difficult to do a pre-trip report for such a spontaneous journey, but here goes…

Christmas in the Hothersall household had been a bit of a mixed bag. Peter works for John Lewis, and since Christmas is their busiest time, he wasn’t allowed to take leave in December. So we visited my parents in Wales in October, and his parents and sister in Preston in November, and had Christmas to ourselves.

Christmas Day was lovely – started with carols and bucks’ fizz at church, and then a wonderful meal in a nice local restaurant. And then on Boxing Day we cooked a small partridge at home. So far, so holly jolly.

Then it all went a bit mistletoe and whine...

First Peter went down with the nasty winter tummy bug, and a few days later so did I. We limped through the rest of the break feeling grotty and sheltering from the seemingly constant rain, and by 2nd of January we were back at work and feeling like we hadn’t really had much of a break. Still, we could look forward to Friday 4th of January – we were off to Wales to visit my parents for the weekend. We’d be going out for lunch together, to celebrate my Dad’s 81st birthday on Sunday. Or so we thought.

On the Thursday evening, we got a phone call from my Mum. She’d gone down with a nasty throat infection, and neither she nor my Dad would be going out at all for a few days. She told us not to come – partly because she didn’t feel up to it, and partly because she didn’t want to pass on her germs to us. So we fixed a weekend in March instead, and left it at that.

So that evening, instead of packing and getting ready to go away, we found ourselves with a free evening, and the prospect of a free long weekend. Oh good, we thought. There were loads of things that needed doing. We could take the tree down, tidy up a bit, maybe see some friends. Peter had booked the Friday off, and I had booked the afternoon off, so maybe he could meet me for lunch and we’d go round town a bit. Nice, sensible things like that.

So of course it follows that we spent the evening pricing up whether a sneaky DLP trip would be possible. And after trying dozens of different combinations, and setting a record for the number of ‘tabs’ on the internet open at once, we decided not to be silly, it was much too expensive. OK, so Peter might give them a ring tomorrow just to check, but no, we really shouldn’t entertain such ideas.

The fact that the next day of this report is called ‘Day 1’ should give you an inkling that this was not the end of the story. But that’s for another thread.



>>> Day 1

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