Monday 27th July London to Maidstone.

Today was our morning to leave London. After breakfast we went back up all those stairs to our room to pack our bags. We slid them down the four flights of stairs to the lobby and we checked out and said goodbye to Christiano.

Out on to the footpath and we walked our cases up the two blocks to Paddington Station. We had to go down about 24 stairs to the platform and some nice young man who was coming up from the train took Jannie's bag down to the bottom as a favour. Very nice.

We got on the subway train to Oxford Circus where we had a cross platform change to Victoria Station. Once we got out to the National line we queued up for tickets to Gatwick airport. Only four stops along the way but still took about 30 minutes at high speed. Every time we passed a train coming the other way Jannie got a flight as it made a loud bang as the two trains passed and sort of sucked together. We arrived at Gatwick and went and ot a free coffee at the New Costas - sort of a new promotion for a new store.

We headed out of the station and downstairs to the rental car section. We found the Eurocar stall and took a ticket from the machine and went and took a seat and waited for our number 0076 to come up. They had 8 operators on deck and we waited one hour for our turn to get our car that was prebooked and paid for before we left home. Finally got to our VW Golf, loaded up sat and waited for our new GPS to hook in to the route and we were on our way to Maidstone in Kent. Route was onto M25 then onto the M20 that became something else like the A20 then the A249!!!

Finally got to the Larkfield Priory Hotel and settled into our really nice large room with large bathroom on the ground floor, unpacked and decided to go and have a sandwich and a beer for lunch - late as it was. No service at this time of the day for food so we went for a walk to a local cafe and had a coffee and a sandwich. There was a rather nice supermarket in the shopping area. Salmon was £5.45 a kilo, cooked chickens £5.95. There were some very strange looking fish on sale. Not that we were buying.

We walked back to the hotel and read, caught up with emails and watched the news. We decided to go down to the restaurant for dinner and had Roast. A bit like lining up for Rotary dinner. Really disappointing as although it was under heat lamps it wasn't better than luke warm. I complained but just got a sorry will tell the maintenance man?? Still we enjoyed the red wine in the lounge area.

Really long day