Day 6 - London to Isle of Man

We asked for late check out and that would be a mistake later in the day.

As we looked out of the window this morning we realized why people do not like English weather. Dark grey skies and rain. We were lucky to have bike in covered parking as loading a bike in the wet is not fun.

We have stayed in very nice hotels (not necessarily expensive) and the Staybridge in Westville Stratford, London is one of them. Service was just outstanding and being close to a large shopping center and the free laundry room were a big plus.

We were supposed to go to Oxford, may be even go past Churchill's castle in Woodstock but leaving at 2pm with this type of weather and needing to be at Liverpool for a 6:30pm ferry meant we had to give up all of the side sightseeing and just make our way to Liverpool.

The traffic was awful for 200 miles. Yes, no typing error. Back to back queues, sometimes at total stop all the way. And these are minimum 3 lane wide (sometimes 6 lanes) highways. I never thought I would be asking but here it is "where are the toll roads when you need them ?". We just do not know how the British survive this nonsense. Words like M25, M1 and M6 are now close to swear words for me.

After being rained upon for a long time, the weather got dry and the sun appeared and gave us a beautiful sunset.

We lane split, we used all the good will we met for "bikers in the rain" but we arrived in Liverpool ferry dock at 8:30, 2 hours later than we needed to and of course lost the ferry.

But we are tough and we wanted desperately to go to the Isle of Man so we rode another 90 minutes and went to the port of Heysham and caught the ferry that left at 2:15 am and arrived at 6 in the morning. We slept well.

It was a very long day and we slept very little but we were on the Isle of Man and that ladies and gentlemen as you will hear in next blog was worth all the hassle.

 

Click HERE for all the pictures for Day 6

 

Posted by Armando