Too much stuff! We have seen so many things, it's impossible to find the time to write about all of them, so I've decided to cheat and do a catchup post about the things we did since we left Swanage:

1. We drove from Swanage to Basingstoke on the 27th, taking a small detour via the National Car Museum at Beaulieu in the New Forest. It wasn't cheap to get in, but there was lots to see - an exhibition of cars from the James Bond films over the last 50 years, a De Lorean mocked up like Back to the Future, the "Top Gear Experience", with a space mocked up Iike the Top Gear studio and a selection of cars from the different challenges. We spent most of the day at the museum, and as is becoming a regular refrain on this trip we didn't have enough time to see everything. Got some great photos, though, especially of the gorgeous Aston Martins!

2. We spent the evening in Basingstoke with Ralph's half brother, Bob and his wife Maureen. They laid on a nice spread for dinner, and it was great to spend an evening talking with them. We only had the one night in Basingstoke, basically a transit stop on our way to Bedford.

3. We drove from Basingstoke to Bedford on the 28th, and this time we stopped at Bletchley Park. It's most well known as the place where brain boxes turned their attention from crosswords to codes and broke the German Enigma encryption. These days, it's a bit of a Mecca for geeks and computer nerds, as the birthplace of modern computing. It's also something of a shrine to Alan Turing, who was instrumental in devising the Bombe, which was critical to breaking the Enigma codes, and the concept of the Universal Computing Machine which predates all our current computer devices. I was at geek defcon 2!

4. We spent two nights at Bedford, at the Wyboston Lakes Hotel. It was a bit fancier than many of our hotels - we had a £20 allowance each at the restaurant, which seemed generous until we saw the price of the mains. The food was divine, but the allowances only offset the cost of the meal. Without it, dinner for two would have cost about $130! However, it was worth it, as the food was probably the best we've had all trip...

5. We spent our main day in Bedford at Ravenstone, where Jaime was looking into her family history in the area. We found an old church where one of her ancestors was the sexton, and went to the Bedfordshire and Luton Archive and Record Service (BLARS) to deposit a photo that Jaime had of an old building in Bedford. Well, we tried to go to BLARS, but in true local government fashion, we had to take the long way round to find the entrance to the building, and every sign seemed to point us to a different place. After some persistence, though, we found the right door, and managed to complete our mission in Bedford.

After Bedford, we drove down to Kent, specifically Chatham, on Saturday. I'll tell you more about Chatham in my next post.