Getting back to "normal"

I dropped Son-of-Furtheron back at university this weekend. So with Mrs F back at work as of last Wed and Daughter-of-Furtheron back at school as of last Tuesday we are pretty much back to normal now... well as normal as we ever get around here! Although D-o-F will be out of school for a week soon as she has "work experience" week. Never seems right when that came for my son I thought "he is too young for this" but she is 15 now - where have the years gone?

We timed the run to deepest, darkest Mordor (Ceredigion in other words ;-)) brilliantly. We'd thought of going on Friday but the weather didn't look great so delayed a day. Great planning it turned out, as we had a really good run - my sons flat mate had a terrible journey on the Friday as the weather caused some accident on the A44 which is the main route into Aberystwyth and that meant detours through some tricky roads. If you know West Wales at all you'll know that there aren't many roads that come close to resembling what dwellers of many other parts of the UK would refer to as a "trunk route"!

Anyway after a nice cheap stay over night in a little hotel I had a lovely journey back, glorious sunshine pretty much the whole way and apart from one minor hold up with a crash at the M42/M40 junction that luckily had closed the M42 not the M40 it was pretty much cruising all the way and hardly much traffic about - even the M25 behaved itself. I was back by mid afternoon just in time for Mrs F to put the kettle on for our afternoon cuppa! I'm resold on the M40 route now as the M1 has been such a pain on the last few trips the South West part of the M25 (which I generally will walk over broken glass to avoid) is I think worth the pain to avoid the seemingly permanent 20 mile tailback that is around Newport Pagnell any time I hit the M1 in either direction.