Launching Cy's car

With its huge fins and tail lights, Cy's baby blue Ford Galaxy convertible looked like a relic from either an alien planet junk yard or an unfinished Flash Gordon movie set. As always, it was parked halfway up the curb, more on the sidewalk than off it. A parking ticket fluttered from the windscreen. The car was like Cy in many ways; it was big, outlandish, almost exotic, completely out of place and out of time but still managing to look cool. And the car lumbered just as he did, attracting attention, lots of amused glances and lots of parking tickets. “Christ! I hate getting these!” Cy stuffed the ticket into his ping pong bat bag. “Maureen wants us back for lunch, it’s kinda good she likes you Denis under most other circumstances, she hates the people I drag around the house. But you, she likes you, my young friend. Go figure!”
Cy gently rocked the car back and forth until he had enough room to launch it into the road. He drove so slowly, he looked as if he was prowling, which was just as well because, when Cy was behind the wheel, he insisted on looking at the person he was speaking to, not at the road.
“Cy, look out!”

Highway or byway? I did it my way.

“You didn’t take the motorway?" Dave, our genial keyholder, asked. "Should have taken the motorway, you would have been here in an hour. Hour and a quarter at the outside.”
I apologized again for our late arrival. Frances smiled, said nothing. To her credit, she did not gloat, at least not openly, at our navigational error. Our journey had taken almost three hours.
Dave couldn’t resist reminding me of the errors of my ways though. “You mean you were on the A12, then came off it? That’s a shame. I hate those little roads, all those twists and turns! Takes you an hour to go ten miles. Like I said—”
“The motorway.” I knew. I sighed.
He went on cheerfully, “Oh, well. Never mind, you’re all here now, so that’s alright.”

Finally back in Broadstairs

“Look, that’s where Dickens stayed,” I enthused. “And that’s where he wrote The Pickwick Papers! There! D’you see? There’s a blue plaque.”
No one cared.
At the end of the High Street, the sea suddenly appeared, then disappeared from view. We turned onto Albion Street, gaily painted with double yellow lines and decorated with sporadic meters and lots of no-parking signs.
“There’s nowhere to park! Brilliant, bloody brilliant!”
Then, just past the harbor pub, The Tartar Frigate, I was relieved to find a waterfront car park tucked into the lea of a cliff. I stopped the car, got out, and stretched my legs. The harbor, originally built by Henry the Eighth, jutted out like a giant, slightly curved anvil, protecting its brightly colored, bobbing fishing fleet, a few waves away from a crescent beach, the pristine footprint of Vikings Bay.
“What do you think, not bad, eh? At the end of the harbor, we can even buy some cockles and winkles for tea!” I said, happy again.

A riverside discovery, part 2

Eventually the sky opened up, the brush and trees disappeared, and we came upon the river Thames and the tiny village of Moulseford. We pulled up at what we thought was a pub but, on closer inspection, it seemed we had found the Beetle and Wedge, a fancy riverside restaurant with a small adjoining hotel. Cars were already in the parking lot. A good sign. As we headed to the entrance, we saw someone piling lumps of coal on a semi-outdoor grill. I had not seen coal on a fire since I was a boy.

A riverside discovery, part 1

We saw, by luck, a tiny bracken-covered sign leading to the tiny, riverside hamlet of Moulseford. The road seemed narrow, with tall grasses brushing the side windows as we turned. Then the road became narrower still, shrinking to the size of a bike path. This teeny roadway was thoughtfully dotted with tarmac flanges placed, presumably, to minimize head-on collisions and murder-suicides. In such a tight spot we finally ‘killed our speed,’ but no one else did. A stout man in a Jag, the actor who played Inspector Strange on Morse, one of my favorite shows, mimed swear words at us as we dithered onto a nearby flange to let him pass. I had no idea who had the right-of-way, but I had a young family and a desire to live.

Still wending our way around the Thames Valley

We were still eager to discover the picturesque Thames Valley, still desperate for a stroll at the water’s edge. But the more we zigzagged the ancient waterway, zooming along at sixty miles an hour despite the ‘kill your speed’ signs, the more we seemed cut off by the very thing that had attracted us to the area in the first place – the river. Quite often, we approached a town, drove over a span of bridge, and found the town gone. Most, it seemed, had been built on one side of the Thames and had sprawled along that one bank. Crossing the river at a promising spot, we’d find nothing except boring bits of pasture and a few trees. We actually double-backed several times to see what we might have missed. And sometimes we overlooked the teeny-tiny directional arrows and missed a village completely, resulting in more zigzagging and even more backtracking.

We later realized, the best way to see the Thames Valley was on a boat, floating around the soft curves of the river, traveling at the water’s pace, discovering tiny bank-side hamlets, and generally enjoying the slowness and tranquility of the journey, rather like Mole and Ratty.

Planning over breakfast

Over breakfast, Frances and I discussed the day’s itinerary. Our plan was to zigzag the Thames Valley, crossing the river at various leafy intersections and immersing ourselves in literary landmarks and points of interest that dotted this area. For once, the itinerary had been my idea, but Frances was agreeable and, with the weather still sunny, the views would at least be pretty.
Frances looked up suddenly and realized Kate was gone. The French doors were open, we thought of the pond. Of Kate’s attraction to goldfish. But she had simply sat down at another table, adopted a family in another part of the dining room. When we came up to her, our toddler was happily sucking on her bottle in the company of her two new ‘brothers.’ Oddly, the father just carried on reading his newspaper as if nothing untoward had happened, and the mother didn’t seem to mind either.

Driving into London

The road became dense with cars, trucks, buses, vans, and motorized scooters that zigzagged around the massed traffic like demented pilot fish that had lost their way. Apart from intermittent stop signs, everything seemed to be speeding up. Everything, that is, except my reactions. I was feeling tired. Grimy. Horrid. And dreading where I was going. What had I been thinking? Why, oh why, was I planning to dwell in the damp valleys of East Anglia and not, say, in the sun-drenched hill towns of Tuscany? Oh, Christ. I was heading for ten days of gloom and doom.