Wednesday, 7th May, 2014

Country: England
Distance travelled:
Weather: windy, cloudy

This morning, with a mission in mind, we were up and moving fairly soon. I took the opportunity to have another shower, just because I could and then we set off on our trek across London to catch up with Marks’ friends. Fortunately the campsite reception sells public transport tickets so we were spared the difficulty of sorting all that out, especially since I had left the London Oyster cards we bought on our last UK trip in Manchester. By 10.30am we were seated on a bus and on our way.

From the bus we transferred to an overground train and then onto the underground. A second train swap on the underground got us to Clapham Common where we walked though parkland to the pub, The Windmill on the Common, where we were to have lunch.

Our lunch mates were on time and everyone ordered. We ate, we drank, we chatted all afternoon. Quite late in the afternoon, two of our group had to head home but the last guy, Gary, stayed on. We decided to have dinner, and Mark and Gary had a few more drinks and chatted some more. Just after 11pm, I pointed out to Mark that we had about an hour and a half of travel before we would be back to the van so we reluctantly headed off.

We retraced our steps back though the underground until we reached Seven Sisters where we were to change to the above ground train. Being short of milk, I insisted we stop in at one of the off-license minimart shops we passed and while there I tried to source some crumpets since, with EHU available, we can use the toaster in the van. I have no idea what the predominant ethnicity in the area was, but apparently crumpets are not universally loved. I tried three shops before I gave up in defeat. I could have bought honeycomb at midnight, but apparently crumpets are out of the question…

At this point we discovered that we had missed the last train heading back to Edmonton Green. Fortunately as we stood somewhat puzzled on the street outside the train station, Mark noticed that the adjacent bus stop signage was proclaiming the next bus to be heading there anyway. We jumped on as soon as the bus appeared and were at the Edmonton Green bus station just before 1am. Unfortunately the last bus to the campsite was at 12.30. Not to be daunted, Mark checked on his GPS and discovered that the site was only about 1 & 1/2 miles away so we decided a nice stroll through unknown parts of suburban London in the wee small hours was just what we needed. It turned out to be a very peaceful walk and we were back in the van and tucked into bed before 2am.

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