Let me see, where was I? Ah yes, just finished having dinner with the family and gone to bed for the night. It was 10pm which meant I had survived the jet lag tiredness ok. However come the next morning my body decided it hated me and I awoke at my usual time of 4am. Even with the freaking time zone change I still decided to wake up early, how annoying is that?
The plan for the next day was to be driven to my sister in laws by my parents, have lunch and then spend the rest of the time in England with my sister in law. It sort of worked out like that but there was a bit more activity than that. Since we were in England my wife really wanted to find a good pair of wellington boots to bring home with us since the selection we've found in the US hasn't been that great. We drove in to the town I grew up in to check out the shops at the mall. It was kind of weird seeing how things have changed and the town I knew is quite changed from what I grew up with. To give you an idea of the kind of place it is now see wikipedia or for a more realistic view the urban dictionary since it has become a real chav town now. It is a strange kind of town, before the 1950s it didn't really exist and then it was a planned town where a lot of the people who lived in the run down areas of London were moved to. One of those people was my father whereas my mother lived on a farm in the area. So you have this relatively new town with a lot of old buildings dotted around the area (see Worth Church e.g.).
Anyway, bit of an aside there, back to the shopping. We did look around a bit to try and find some good wellies but had no real luck. As I said seeing how the town has changed was weird but we did find a lovely dress for my wife and some good greetings cards since a lot of the ones we find in the US are pretty crap. Once shopping was completed we headed off to my sister in laws. This meant surviving more of my fathers driving but it was motorway most of the way. Once we got off the motorway though we got in to the typical country roads you find in England while making our way to the small village my sister in law lives in. We are talking single lane roads where if you come across another car coming the other way one of you is backing up a bit to find a slightly wider bit of road in order to pass one another. The driveway at our house is wider than most of these roads.
Still, we made it to the house with no real problems courtesy of a GPS and got out and greeted the people there. Waiting for us was my sister in law, her husband who we were meeting for our first time, our new nephew and unfortunately my mother in law. To say my wife and her sister are continuously annoyed and aggravated by my mother in law would be an understatement so it was annoying that she had decided to spend the week there. We got there just in time for lunch and since the weather from California had followed us from England it was a lunch out in the garden with all 8 of us. The original plan then was for my parents to drive home then but my lovely new brother in law, being the generally polite person he is, invited my parents to stay for the dinner out we were having that day which they obviously accepted since they could spend more time seeing me and my wife. However my wife has never gotten along well with my father, he is a person who can really lack tact and humility a lot of the time and it winds her up to no end. I've become numb to it having grown up with him but can understand how my wife feels. It doesn't help that he really didn't ingratiated himself with her early on before we were married by offering to pay off the wedding if she didn't want to go through with it..... yeah really.
Anyway in order to escape my parents for a bit my wife stayed with her sister for a few hours while I and my parents went to where we were going to be sleeping whilst we were in England since my sister in law doesn't have enough room for everybody to sleep at her house let alone the fact that our nephew still wakes up a lot noisily during the night. This place is a converted stable/barn kind of thing which is now a self catering lodge kind of thing. To get to this place though you go down an even narrower road, this one was so narrow the middle of it had moss growing in it since you had about 6 inches of space to either side of your car so there was no way for anything to actually run down the middle of the road.
The afternoon then passed fairly peacefully with general lazing around and napping taking place before we went out for dinner that evening. This is where my mother in law managed to start her reign of annoyance. The place we went to dinner in was a nice restaurant in the next slightly larger village over. Once we had gotten there my mother in law decided she did not feel well, didn't want anything to eat and my sister in law had to spend 20 minutes driving her back to the lodge. Once past that though we had some good food and my father managed to virtually monopolise the conversation with my brother in law with a game of one upping one another about stuff.
Once dinner was over we crammed in to my sister in laws car, said goodbye to my parents and got driven back to the lodge before collapsing in to bed exhausted again. I should mention here though the most important thing about the evening, the fact that my wife was the most gorgeous person there in one of the dresses she had brought with her to wear. She looked absolutely great and brought a big smile to my face. I was proud to be married to her.
Until the next update then when I detail the first day we had where I managed to get to spend a decent amount of time with our nephew and loved every minute of it.
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