Sunday, 17 June 2012 - Sunday's moving day

Today we said goodbye to Cumbria and headed off south to Cirencester - Tricia's birthplace.  (I hope there is a plaque somewhere).  As usual we have plenty of time, so we have a leisurely start and finally set off.  Easy going as we end up back on the M6 motorway we had taken from Scotland.  Heading in between Liverpool and Manchester and scooting around the edges of Birmingham.  So we didn't visit any big cities in the UK, but we came close to a large number of them.  We stopped in a small town, whose name I forget, for a coffee and lunch.  No more Motorway Service Centres for us - seasoned travellers now.

We finally made it into Cirencester mid afternoon and took possession of our next residence (another week long stay).  This place was again nice, a two bedroom apartment on the third floor of a lovely old building in an old street just a couple of blocks from the centre of town.  Beautifully done and very comfortable.  The street was a bit of a nightmare though as it was one way, narrow with parked cars all the way down.  At one point we had to drive up on to the very narrow footpath and then drop off it just as a bollard loomed.  I got quite good at that over the next week.  We had an assigned parking space in a courtyard so that was OK.

'Our street' with footpath and bollard, opposite our apartment.

An early morning shot of Cirencester

I also fixed an Internet issue we had suffered.  Most places we went Tricia's laptop, that I was lugging around, didn't connect to the internet.  It didn't connect here either.  At this apartment though,I finally had access to the actual wireless modem router and was able to plug my trusty Ethernet cable in and connect. It was a little cramped as this was in a small room with just enough space for the hot water cylinder, the washing machine, and me, half in and half out the door. I Googled the symptoms and finally found that there was an obscure bug in the driver for this piece of hardware that didn't accept network names over 10 characters lomg.  I downloaded the new patched driver and it all burst into life.  Maybe I should do this IT stuff for a living.  That issue had been bugging me since Italy, so I was a lot happier.

Went for a walk into town and found a small supermarket and got some essential supplies.

Tricia's diary succinctly stated:

Moving on to Cirencester today.  Very excited.  Arrived just after 3.  Lovely apartment.