Ok, after two long days my wife and I are finally rid of my parents and safely resting in Kent. We had a good long sleep in the place we were staying at, however we had no car having been dropped off the night before by my sister in law. According to her husband it is a short walk across a field to get to their house so we decided to do that in the morning to go and get breakfast at my sister in law's house.
Little did they tell us that they are at the top of a hill and the place we were sleeping at is at the bottom..... Not to mention the diagonal path across the field was gone since it had been plowed and seeded so we had to go the long way along the edge and find the path leading to the back of the houses. A nice trog up a hill and through some unknown pathways, just what you need first thing in the morning before breakfast when you are starved and have a wife whose surgery scars still can't be stretched too much.
We did get to my sister in laws house ok though and had breakfast. It was then my wife and I's turn to take our little nephew out on our own (with mother in law in tow unfortunately) to do a bit of shopping and get a couple of things. I had been looking forward to spending time with him since he is generally a happy little chap, being 3 months old and mainly in the eat, sleep and poop phase of babyhood. We got the car seat all set up in my mother in law's car, the doing of which involved removing an entire back seats worth (seat to ceiling) of crap my mother in law had decided to bring with her, we are talking blankets, boxes of random shit and other odds and ends that she travels with for no good reason. Then with everyone safely strapped in our trek started.
I should describe my mother in law's car here now. I drive a nice big Volkswagen SUV, roomy and reasonably large with a biggish engine (especially for England). However my mother in law has a 1.1 litre Suzuki Alto, basically a small tin can with an engine. It was my first time driving in England for quite a while, including driving a manual car but it came back to me pretty easily. We had to drive down those same fun narrow country roads, through another village, wait at a train crossing (more on this later) and headed off to the local Tesco supermarket to get some food and supplies.
Upon arriving at the supermarket (which I somehow found from memory having last been there 6 years ago) we noticed something odd. For some reason there were a lot of people standing around outside seemingly just milling about. Strange we thought. As we got a little bit closer we could hear it. That shrill sound of fire alarms going off. Oh dear.
With that sight and sound to greet us I turned the car around and we headed off to another supermarket we knew about nearby, the good old local "the Asda" (think a supermarket chain that ended up being bought by Walmart and you get the idea). We got there with no problems and I actually managed to get the car up to 70mph despite it's best efforts to impede my lead foot.
One good thing about parking at supermarkets it that in England they have "mother and baby" parking to make it easier for people with children to get their kids in and out of car seats and have parking near to the entrance of the supermarket. Using our nephew to take advantage of this we unstrapped him from his seat, got him in to a shopping trolley and headed in.
We immediately managed to get annoyed by my mother in law who decided that she must have a sun hat. She does this every time we are anywhere and I'm sure she has a collection building up in a spare bedroom at home. After spending an inordinate amount of time of her trying on various hats (including the complaining that there wasn't a mirror to see how it looked despite there being one at the end of the aisle) we finally got on with the actual shopping we went there for.
Now I should definitely mention here English food, specifically the foods we have been missing living in the US. Before we traveled to England my sister in law gave my wife access to her online food shopping account and my wife went through and found and bought a whole bunch of food. She managed to get us all sorts of things we had been pining for and wanted to eat when we were there. One of these things is something my wife loves called Faggots which she was planning to have for dinner that night. I on the other hand am not so keen on them so we got some nice Salmon to have. Since we were there we also availed ourselves of some lovely British chocolate. During all this time our nephew was having a grand time and behaving himself nicely despite the warnings from my sister in law that he was a grumpy bugger :-) .
We got the shopping done just in time for our nephew to require feeding so we set him up in his car seat again and fed him before setting off back to the house. Once we got back the rest of the day was fairly quiet, I played in the garden with their dog who was overly attentive of me and we did some washing.
When I say washing I mean lots and lots of washing. We brought two suitcases with us, one of which was completely full of clothes we had bought for our nephew. We had so much that we used space bags to suck the air out of and compress the clothes down to try and squeeze them all in. The final pile of clothes that we had unpacked was huge, it towered above my sister in law as she sat on the sofa and looked at them all.
The evening then passed fairly quietly as my brother in law came home from work, food was scoffed down and we collapsed for the evening. We attempted to watch a bit of British TV but we were all fairly worn out so we said our good nights and headed off to bed. Well I had to drive down the road a little bit to where we were staying but you get the idea.
Next update we will cover the cool day out at the beach we had on Friday and the other stuff that went on including the eating of more delicious food. Also to be covered is how much we enjoyed being with our little nephew and how it made me feel about children (the whole not having kids thing).
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