Travels with Jonathan Part 2 - The frozen north

The weekend after attending the reunion in Mansfield I had to travel up to Dalgety Bay in Fife to drop my kids off at my parents for a week's holiday. The A1 was the chosen route and that was the last time I will willingly take that route north. The conditions were terrible and the road is just not fit for purpose. It wasn't helped by the fact that just into Scotland the road was flooded in 2 places and there were still idiots determined to do 100mph in any event.

On the Sunday due to the Forth Road Bridge being closed I had to take the Kincardine Bridge and travel down the M6 route. I did the journey in about an hour less than normal. Partly because I only had to stop when I needed to stop and partly because the traffic was fine until you got down to Lancaster. I stopped at Tebay, the much vaunted service station on the M6. On the same journey I had to stop at Bothwell near Glasgow, and on the return leg Birch and Bolton. Tebay southbound is better than the northbound at the moment largely because northbound there is a building site. But the point is that Tebay may well scalp you on the prices just like all the others but you resent paying the prices less because the surroundings and service are so much better than those provided by the big multiples.

One question that did puzzle me is why in hot sunny weather when common sense would dictate that women would wear strapless undergarments they insist on showing little or no fashion sense and show off every little item they are wearing straps and all.

Edinburgh does have something in common with Mansfield. Yes I know it sounds odd but it is true. Edinburgh for all its wonderful buildings and beautiful surroundings is a grimy city. If the city fathers took more time to clean the place up it would be an even bigger draw to tourists but just a couple of streets away from the Royal Mile the bin bags were piled high by the road side on a Saturday when the number of tourists is huge. The numbers were swollen by the gathering of the clans which boiled down to essentially, a lot of people dressed up in tartan.

Edinburgh is my favourite capital city of those I have visited and I could happily live there and probably go bankrupt in the shops.