Bluehook's Diary

I started doing this diary in June. If you haven't been following have a look at the Cast of Characters which gives a quick low down on the essential day to day characters who are mentioned here...it will make more sense if you do.

Out of bed with an alarm clock this morning and even so I felt like I didn't have a lot of time to get myself together to leave and feed the horses and have a bath and all that sort of stuff, plus I had woken up with an extreme stiff neck which would only turn in one direction but I did manage to get on the road by 10.30 am.

The first part of the journey was nice enough, wet but not heavily so and there wasn't all that much traffic on the roads. I know my way as far as the M6 but beyond there I had made a route plan by looking at the map and had that written down. I stopped as I was joining the motorway to pick up a hitch hiker who wanted to go to Preston which was beyond where I was planning to go but when he saw my route plan he told me I was mad and what I wanted to do was go on to Junction 30 (1 beyond where he wanted to go) and then take one road into Harrogate all the way from there. Since he was a trade driver and since my initial route involved lots of convoluted changing of roads I chose to believe him and took that route instead and actually I think that was lucky for me, I was already running way behind schedule and I would have been more late otherwise.

I found the hotel in Harrogate easy enough and met Paul at reception then went up to dump luggage in the room before joining the Otto Bock crew in the bar where they were just getting started for the evening. After a while everyone dispersed to get ready for dinner and then met up after a while to go to a Chinese Restaurant. I found myself having dinner with eleven men and that may just be a first. The restaurant had given us one table for twelve people and were not too impressed when they took it upon themselves to rearrange the tables to put two together and the waiters were worried about the orders being confused and how the kitchen would react and it was all a bit odd really. I was quite glad to get back to the room and lie on the enormous bed and watch tv for a bit.


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