That’s it. We’re home from the rugby, it’s finished. It’s after midnight, which means we fly home today, so the trip is all over.
Because it’s 12:30am this blog is also over (for now). I will try and update today’s (yesterday’s) blog tomorrow (today).
Good morning. Quick roundup of yesterday.
First up we drove down to Milton Keynes to suss out where the stadium is in relation to an English pub for dinner and parking. Found the stadium, not too sure about the others, all depends on whether or not we can park in a shopping centre car park adjacent to the stadium. Enough of that, let’s get to Dibley (scene of ‘The Vicar of Dibley’).
There is no such place as Dibley, it’s just a figment of Dawn French’s imagination. It has to be filmed somewhere though and it turns out it is filmed in a little village named Turville, near Oxford. Interesting trip, through a hundred other little villages and down some more very narrow hedge-lined roads. Turville has an impressive filmography, Google it.
We arrived at midday, so into the Bull an Butcher for lunch, then a tour of the village. Lunch took longer than the tour. Turville is as small as Dibley makes out to be in the TV series. Worth the trip though, just to see it.
After lunch it was another brief family reunion, this time with Michelle’s uncle Peter at Bicester (pronounced Bister we discovered – easy to tell the tourists). We last saw Peter about 22 years ago. Still picked him as soon as we saw him.
Back to Milton Keynes for the rugby. Lucky we left plenty of time as we had an extensive tour of the city by the time we missed a couple of turns and fruitlessly followed Park and Ride signs. In the finish we fluked a park near the train station, right next to the shuttle bus to the ground.
This seemed too easy, the shuttle bus will drop us back about 20 metres from the car after the game. It turned out that was too easy, it dropped us around the corner. This would have been no trouble in daylight, at 11pm it all looked rather different and it took us 20 minutes to find the car, even though it was probably no more than 200 metres away.
The game was very good, seats were great and out of the rain. The rain marred the handling a bit. Uruguay played very well, despite being about half the size of the Fijians, man for man. Uruguay finished the game with 14 men after their halfback was red carded. In a bizarre twist, he was awarded man of the match!
Driving the 40 miles back to Gumley in the dark on unfamiliar roads, with rain and fog for added interest, was not one of the tour highlights. Especially as the car headlights are about as bright as a birthday cake candle. Not to worry, arrived home at 12:10am.
You are now up to date. We are about to start a final pack up ready for the last leg of the trip.
Bye, Steve J.