Another morning of full English breakfast (with Kippers - oh boy!). But at least we had a great view, overlooking the countryside. We had a couple hours to kill so Paul and I found a knick knack shop that sold a lot of expensive junk the women like. Waterford, Hummel, that kind of junk. Oops! Sorry, my wife might be reading this. I didn't mean to say junk, I meant to say precious future heir looms - Silly me! We bought a couple of little Wedgewood thingies for the Wife, Mom and Busia back home. Mucho brownie points!
Morgan is a car where time has almost stood still. If it wasn't for emission controls, they probably would still be installing the old klunker engines. As it is, the cars are still mostly a steel frame with wood floors and aluminum body panels gently tapped over more wood. The finished product is beautiful, but the car really is a rolling picnic for a herd of termites. The Morgan tour consisted of a "Hello, just follow the line painted on the floors". You could stop and ask anybody anything. They couldn't initiate a conversation, but if you started it, they could stand there and jaw with you for hours. A very noisy place. Lots of ear plugs and headphones to protect the worker's ears. The break room obviously hadn't been painted in many, many years. It was covered with girly pictures and management told them that if they wanted it painted they would have to remove all the girly pictures. I guess it isn't going to need paint for quite a while. There was a map of the U.S. on the wall with a lot of push pins all over it. The tradition is for visitors from the U.S. to place a pin on the map from where they came from. They pull them all out and start over every year. This was March and there were probably 50 pins all over the map already. We bought a couple of souvenir T-shirts and headed out.
We stopped at Halfords to look for Elan M100 brake rotors for Mark. Halfords is a chain of auto parts stores that look just like a Trak Auto back home. Lots of parts and lots of junk. Mark couldn't find the rotors he wanted, but he did buy a plastic toy animal for the dash of the Mercedes. "Grommet" is a cartoon character dog and he was now our Guardian Saint on the dash for the rest of the trip. Grommet had a spring loaded neck so that when Rich would step on the gas, poor grommet would get whiplash. When Rich stomped on the brakes to narrowly avoid wiping out 6 cars in the round-about (an hourly occurrence), Grommet would duck his head (so did we). At idle, the engine vibrations would make Grommet's head buzz up and down. You could tell we were all starting to get tired as we were very entertained by this. Simple minds - simply
entertained.
We stopped at the Safeway food store for some road snacks to tide us over for the next road trip. Interesting selection again. I bought a Camembert cheese and sliced apple sandwich (with lettuce and mayo!) Actually not bad at all. Actually I was very hungry. Some of the stuff the boys got though was disgusting. Mark tried some Prawn flavored Cheetos. Yes, they were bad. Jack bought what looked to be some standard jelly beans - ha! The green ones tasted like crab grass and the black ones must have just been dried latex paint. But the worst road food of all were the "Twigletts". They looked like small pretzel sticks but tasted like.., burnt twigs! "Oh man these are truly awful... try some" Mark said. Sure, if they were good you wouldn't offer them to anyone, but since they are truly awful, you offer them to us! We all tried them, and then tried to scrape our tongues on the floor to get rid of the taste. All except Rich who plopped the bag in the middle of the dash over the speedometer and snacked on them for days. Since Twigletts tasted like twigs to begin with, how would you know if they ever went bad?
Since Jim's wife had a lonely heart back home, we drove an hour and a half out of our way to drop him off at the bus station. And drop him off we did. I could hear him as we slid the side door shut: "Are you sure this is the right bus sta...." slam! Rich floored it and off we went.
On the road to Blackpool, home of TVR, we thought we might have time to look at a castle. So we looked at the map and sure enough, where in America you would have a little airplane on the map indicating where you would find an airport, in England you have a little picture of a castle where you would find.., a CASTLE! How convenient! So we did a little detour to the town of Lancaster (where's Burt?), a couple of inches away from Blackpool on the map. Now this is the neat way to travel. We just roll into town and look for lodging.
The first sign for a Best Western was right next to Lancaster University. The sign even had the price posted, £130 per person. No thanks! We rolled a little further into town and found a nice old 3 story inn. It was a steep climb up the stairs to the third floor, but the rooms were reasonable. We dropped off our stuff and headed off for some dinner. We found a chain restaurant that looked promising but again the best part of dinner (other than the wonderful beer) was that the food didn't make you sick. We finished off the evening with a few more pints at the hotel bar. Rich was quietly sitting by himself - Very unlike him. I asked him why, and he said, " I've got a van full of neat Lotus parts, but no more money". Well, we can't have that long, sad face for the rest of the trip! I loaned Rich £50 and he immediately cheered right up and bought us a round. Hey, that's what friends are for!
