ROAD TRIP

MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE
“Greg’s Way” was in all its glory the other day. I went on a business trip with Colin through the Midlands of England.  My host for this trip and fellow Granddad is retired from British Rail and had taken this job making deliveries for a company... just to get out of the house. It was my chance to see a part of England I had never seen, and when asked if I was interested, I jumped at the chance. 

Colin said the trip was nothing special, but armed with a sandwich and a bottle of water, I was ready to pounce on a previously unseen world with the abandon of a reckless explorer. The world, if the Midlands of England could be so construed, was revealed to me and as we barreled down the highways and through little town after little town I was pleased to see life lived on the everyday scale. Too often people equate places with the bigger cities: London is England, Paris is France, New York is the United States… but we all know that is not true.

Our 160 mile or so route from Crewe to Leicester led us through several small gritty honest towns. England is still on the Imperial system and lengths and MPHs are measured in miles not kilometers. We made a couple of stops in business parks and met fork lift drivers and somehow beat all the major traffic snarls that usually accompany such trips. We passed countless fields and countless gardens and countless children off on holiday and never once did I close my eyes in fear because I didn’t know where traffic was coming from because Colin was driving.

Because “we” were working we couldn’t just haphazardly make a left or a right when something suited us. Along the way we did pass signs for Bosworth, where Richard III met his end, but of course we could not deviate. We never really got closer than the industrial parks on the outside of Leicester and could not search out where they finally discovered the infamous Richard III buried beneath a parking lot.  We could not stop and explore the National Brewery Museum in Burton Upon Trent even though Colin deviated his route back to Crewe and we PASSED RIGHT BY IT. We could not stop. We were working after all.

NATIONAL BREWERY CENTRE

With my face plastered against the window of the van I was happy to travel about and was left hungry for more. As Granddads we chortled about our progeny and worried about the future and complained about the past’s influences on the present. We cured all the world's ails and were happy that we had the chance to live a life as fortunate as ours. It was a great day to be alive.

Thanks for reading!

love greg