With a long day ahead
of us, we planned to get away as soon as we could after breakfast, packing up
in the drizzly rain. Even with no alarm set, we were on the road out of
Woodmansey by 8.45 am. We had debated our route at length, comparing that
suggested by Tomtom, and settled on a compromise between the three of us; the satellite
and map reading navigators and The Chauffeur. (One must understand that Tomtom
is unable to understand that a route suitable for a car is not necessarily one
suitable for a caravan rig.)
Our route today was
via the A1079 through to the York ring road, then south west on the A64 toward
Leeds before turning north again onto the A1(M) which we followed all the way
through to the junction of the A697 just west of Morpeth. Powburn lies on this
road a little to the north west of Alnwick, five map page turns and five counties from the
start of our journey.
We had scheduled our
midday stopover for Durham Services and would have arrived a little after 11 am
had there not been an accident on the motorway. Twenty miles or so south of the
Service Centre, an electronic sign warned that there had been an accident
between Junction 61 and 62; we agreed that it was fortunate we were pulling off
before then. Little did we realise that the traffic would be backed up so far
south; we crawled from one stationery position to another for the two and a
half miles before the exit, taking a full hour to do so. Even then we lingered
over lunch, wondering if the traffic congestion would have cleared by the time
we hit the road again. Of course this can happen anywhere in the world, even on
the main highway between Auckland and our home town of Whangarei, but here the
volume of traffic is unlike anything we have encountered elsewhere.
But apart from that
incident, our long drive was fairly straight forward. Soon after we left the Beverley
area on the A1079, we were delighted to come upon the absolutely charming
village of Bishop Burton, so very picturesque and worthy of a photo stop if nothing
else, had we not had the caravan in tow, and then again we were pleasantly
surprised as we descended to Market Weighton a little further on, dropping unexpectedly
from the chalk ridge, a short stretch of road that could have well been marked
with “picturesque” green borders on the map. Apart from that, our journey was
along motorways where one’s attention is centred on the traffic and road ahead
rather than any scenic landscapes beyond the road edge, although as we
approached Newcastle, the rain now obscuring everything but our immediate
surroundings, we were able to make out the “Angel of the North”, that massive
sculpture we had decided last year we did not like.
To our delight, the
rain eased as we came through the very tiny village of Powburn, population 260
according to one site googled that offered very little else. And so we were very
glad to set up camp in relatively dry conditions. Since then I have done two
loads of washing and machine dried half while the other half is hanging on our
little rotary line ready for any fine weather that might arrive in the next few
days. We have only four days to explore the region, which stretches up into
Scotland and eastward to the coast, and I have had my evening cut out trying to co-ordinate
a series of tour schedules. Whatever we decide on in the morning will not do
the area justice; all the more reason to return at some later date!
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