DAY 13 - Abergavenny to Chester 10/06/2005
Our Welsh mechanics were thicker than the Lions front row. They sent the only mechanic to get the replacement clutch from a town an hour away, the part they should have got yesterday. Then the fat ...... reckoned it would take all day because he would have to take everything out to squeeze his body in. After many discussions, phone calls and attendences to other call outs, two unskilled skinnier guys, who thought Graham Henry was God, fixed the clutch in 25 minutes. We headed out of Wales at a great rate of knots stopping only for a disgusting sausage, egg, bacon and baked-bean pie.
After a lot of driving we arrived at my second visit to English heaven “Cadburys”. Birmingham didn’t look a very attractive city, but Bournville definitely had a lot going for it, or so I thought until I tasted English chocolate. Even though we were given 8 free bars of chocolate on our factory tour I couldn't eat them at my normal rate as they tasted of too much cocoa. Even the chocolate chippie biscuits we bought weren’t nice, so my only bargain buy was a Cadbury teddy.
It was Friday night by time we got back on the motorway. Progress was slow because of the weekend traffic, so we got off the M6 and headed to Chester via small cities like Shrewsbury. Chester had plenty of easy to find spots for us to do our free Internet thing and had a lovely camp ground just down the road from a country pub. I ordered the mushy peas for the experience and ate all of a teaspoon full. And I had chips; every meal in England comes with chips. We booked our ticket to Ireland, which we could have got for a third of the price if we had booked it 48 hours ahead of time.