Foggy journey home

I was in bed by half past nine last night, and awake by six fifteen this morning, unusually early for me. A thin sliver of the waning crescent moon had just appeared in the sky above the hill beyond the cowshed. The fields below the house and across to the horizon, south and west of us were shrouded in mist, and as the air temperature was one degree, there was a layer or frost on the grass and both our cars, thick enough to need scraping off. I unloaded the dishwasher and laid the breakfast and said Morning Prayer before the others began to surface. Thanks to a surfeit of bacon some of us had bacon butties for breakfast along with cereals and fruit, toast and jam. A hearty breakfast for a cold and frosty morning.

We've all eaten well during our stay at Black Patch, incorporating all our Christmas favourite foods, but it still left us with a fridge full of supplies, enough to last us a couple more days, with an excess of cake and assorted cheeses. In other words, we had over catered without realising, and had to share out what remained to take home with us. Both cars seemed as full for the return trip as for the outbound. Loading a collapsible plastic crate, almost full, into the car boot produced an unexpected crisis when it fell apart with loud crack, spilling its contents into the space it was meant to occupy, and out on the ground behind the car. Nothing was broken, or so we thought, but when we off-loaded the content into a big bag at home, we found that a plastic bottle of olive oil had shed its cap under pressure and spilled its contents on to most of the bag containing it. Such a mess to clear up, it took us half an hour.

The ninety mile journey home via Abergavenny and Newport train station was lengthy an difficult, as the sun didn't evaporate away the mist, and visibility was 50-100 metres on B roads, many of them winding and narrow, relying on google maps satnav instructions for the first fifty miles, unable to see anything of the surrounding landscape to be sure of where we were. An ideal two hour trip on roads with light traffic took us three hours with a half hour stop for coffee in Abergavenny. Dropping off Owain on westbound side of Newport station, which I've not visited before was a disaster. The signage for the drop off zone was hard to read in poor lighting conditions as the street lights were off, automatically triggered in low light, so I missed the entrance, confusing it with the taxi drop off, and then had to exit in a bus lane. I will probably get fined for this error.

When I got home, I check to see if the 'optical network terminal' box attached to our router had been fixed remotely in our absence. From the way it misbehaved differently on two separate days, I felt sure it was a matter of a network error outside our property, and requested an OpenReach visit as suggested, in case it was our equipment, which responded as intended when switched on. It took forty minutes to get through diagnosis via TalkTalk's Direct Message thread on the morning we left, to achieve this. Now I had to go through the same exercise to get the visit cancelled and confirmed by TalkTalk. Not what I needed at the end of an exhausting drive home.

It was getting close to sunset by the time I was able to go for a walk in the part to un-stress myself after a demanding journey, but an hour and twenty minutes in the fresh air was all I needed to calm down. Clare cooked veggies to accompany the remainder of the cooked salmon. Then it was time to catch up on three days missed episodes of the Archers. Kath and Anto's journey was more straightforward, and they got back in time to go a panto in Warwick Castle in which Rhiannon's boyfriend Talion was playing a part. For us, a quiet evening and early bed, still savouring our four days of rural beauty and quietness.