Arrived in London a few days ago and were met by Anne's sister Jane who was just recovering from and finishing up after the end of the school year the previous week. We did some R&R as we tried to adjust to the time zone.

Picked up the rental car today. Had booked a medium class automatic vehicle for the 3 of us and received a Nissan SUV manual. We must say it has all the bells and whistles but readjusting back to the right hand drive with a manual is fun. Can't believe the traffic. The trip to pick up the car at 10 am should have taken 10 minutes but took the the best part of half an hour. Similar time to get back to our place and then wall to wall traffic to get out of London.

Most of the travel to Exeter was on motorways but after about 3 hours we turned off to visit Colyton. This village was were Anne and Jane's paternal great grandmother's family (Searle) came from. Wandered around the village and visited the church for a while but did not see any reference to them. Did not have time to do a hunt in the graveyard.

Then back on the A roads to get to our B&B on the outskirts of Exeter. Had to get across town and hit the rush hour traffic - diabolical. Thank God for GPS systems although the one built into the car is taking some time to get used to. Bruce is finding some of the directional commands unusual but being ordered around by Wanda, as we have named her, is something he is getting used to! One thing we like about GPS systems when travelling is that sometimes it directs us down unusual roads which we might not normally select. We struck one of the these which was a single lane 4 km road with high hedges on both sides and the occasional passing bay. Apart from the hedge it reminded us of the roads on the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Luckily we did not meet any cars although the reversing camera on the rental is really good and no doubt Bruce would have liked the challenge of backing up with it for 200 metres!

Despite this challenge we had no trouble finding our accommodation. After moving into our rooms we headed off into Exeter and down to The Quay for something to eat then walked from there into town. Nice town but most things were shut at this point, including the Cathedral which would not be open until 1pm tomorrow, but it was a nice cool evening and we needed some exercise. We managed to find a different way back to the B&B without going down the narrow single lane.