One of the unexpected perks of working New Zealand hours while travelling in the UK is that every now and then the stars align. Thanks to the international date line, New Zealand was celebrating a public holiday, which meant I scored myself a long weekend while still being in England. I’ll happily take that!
With Mum in the passenger seat and Sophie settled in, we pointed the motorhome south towards the Cotswolds. It was another long driving day, but I’d carefully planned a few interesting stops along the way. If you’re going to spend hours on the road, you may as well break it up with pottery, shopping and a little treasure hunting.
First stop: Portmeirion heaven
Anyone who knows me knows I have a slight weakness for a good factory outlet. (By “slight”, I mean I can usually justify stopping at one within about 100 miles.)
Our first stop was the Portmeirion Pottery outlet at Trefriw. I was secretly hoping to find a few bargains, particularly placemats, but unfortunately they didn’t have the designs I was after.
That didn’t stop me leaving empty-handed though…
A shopping tote and some lovely Hannah Dale (Wrendale Designs) lip balm somehow found their way into my basket. Funny how that happens.
There were also plenty of beautiful Spode, Wrendale and Portmeirion pieces that were doing their absolute best to convince me I needed to buy more. Fortunately, the motorhome has limited cupboard space… otherwise this could have become a very expensive stop!
Decision time…
Originally I’d planned to continue on to the World of Wedgwood, but by this stage common sense kicked in.
We still had a long drive ahead, temperatures were climbing again, and another couple of hours wandering around china wasn’t exactly helping us get any closer to Broadway.
Sometimes the best travel decision is knowing when not to do something.
(Although driving straight past the entrance did require an impressive amount of self-control.)
Lunch with some unexpected company
Instead, we diverted to Denstone Hall Farm Shop & Café.
What a fantastic stop.
Great food, lovely farm shop and plenty to browse while stretching our legs. Outside, there were horses relaxing in the shade… and later, back at the campsite that evening, we even had rabbits hopping around our pitch. I even managed to find some Diddly Squat potato crips - they needed to come with us?
The UK really does know how to make farm shops into destinations.
The great petrol adventure
With temperatures sitting around 32.5°C, the motorhome was drinking fuel almost as fast as I was drinking cold water.
I’d found a filling station offering petrol around 20–30p per litre cheaper than many others nearby.
Sounds brilliant.
Apparently several thousand other motorists had discovered exactly the same thing.
What should have been a quick fuel stop turned into what felt like an hour-long queue. At that point I was mentally calculating exactly how much money I’d saved versus the value of my rapidly disappearing afternoon.
In the end…
…I’d probably still do it again.
Friday afternoon + British motorways = chaos
The remainder of the afternoon was spent making slow progress south.
I’d forgotten just how busy Friday afternoons can be on British motorways during summer. There were long stretches where we seemed to cover less than 20 miles in an hour, which made New Zealand holiday traffic suddenly feel quite reasonable.
Eventually, somewhere around 6 pm, we rolled into our campsite near Broadway.
To our relief there were a couple of pitches left.
Success!
By this point Mum and I were both completely shattered.
Dinner was simple, the air conditioning finally got a rest, and after another hot day on the road there wasn’t much debate about what came next…
Bed.
Tomorrow we’d finally get to start exploring one of the places I’d been looking forward to most — the beautiful Cotswolds.
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