You Sound Like You're From London: A Drive Down South

Things have been going well here in the UK. Work has been busy, but not in a bad way. I feel like I have been getting a lot done, which is always a good feeling.

The weather here has been particularly cold and snowy. As so many other things, "cold and snowy" is very relative. This winter is officially the coldest and snowiest on record since 1979, but the temperature has been barely below freezing and there was only about two feet of snow.

I, for one, have really enjoyed the snow. Besides the fact that we have had multiple work delays because of the weather, it has been nice to see everything covered in white. When I lived in Hawaii I didn't ever travel anywhere cold in the winter. I stayed around the islands and would spend my Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Martin Luther King Day, and Washington's Birthday either at the sand bar on Oahu or at another one of the Hawaiian islands.

Last weekend Kate and I decided to drive down to Stonehenge and Bath in southern England. It was a trip we had planned for New Years, but ended up postponing due to buying a bunch of furniture at an auction.

The trip was good. It was a lot of driving for what we saw, but it was also a good test run for future road trips. We plan on going to continental Europe for some longer road trips, but I have a really hard time paying the going rate for European hostels. No, $30 a night (per person) might not seem like a lot, but I grew accustomed to the $2-6 rooms in Asia. Anything more than that seems like too much money to pay for little more than a dry place to sleep with no privacy.

Solution: turn the Daewoo into an RV! I used to sleep in my Honda whenever I took long drives and I was a big fan of sleeping in the car in New Zealand. The only bad part of the NZ trip was that I didn't have a sleeping bag and it was below freezing outside. I didn't necessarily sleep that well, but the fact that I wasn't paying anything on top of the price of a rental car made that fine by me. With a sleeping bag, I would have been sound as a pound, even without any alterations to the car itself.

The Daewoo is not a lease or a rental, so I can do anything I want to it. None of the interior electronics work (radio, power windows, lights, etc), it is relatively small, and isn't really a joy to drive with the lack of horse power, excessive road noise, and questionable brakes.

Despite that, I think it will make a good RV. For one, vans are too obvious and in places where sleeping in your car is illegal, you are going to get caught. On top of that, roads here are narrow and fuel is crazy expensive (currently about $7.60 per gallon in the UK).

Like I said, last weekend was a good test run. Updates to follow...

Some highlights:

Stonehenge: we spent about 10 minutes here. Not very exciting, but an obligatory item on the "things to see" list if you live in England.

3000 year old open air Roman bath fueled by natural springs in Bath, UK. It was pretty expensive, but we had the place to ourselves all morning. Sitting in an ancient hot spring watching the clouds roll by on a Sunday morning in the middle of January is time well spent.