So, Friday saw us attempting to drive up to the Lakes District. Anyone who has been in London for the last month or more knows how bad the weather has been lately so I’m not sure why, faced with a dire weather warning for the weekend and with the rain that has so far fallen this summer, we even thought we’d be successful this weekend. I guess I was just hoping that if we drove far enough we’d escape the rubbish weather. I was so wrong.

We’d been on the road for about an hour and a half with rain still falling hard when we decided to pull over and make a decision about whether it was worth continuing. Bearing in mind we’d already seen one crash site, one car on fire!, and the motorway flooded on the other side from us, it wasn’t looking good. To add insult to injury the first service station we pulled into lost its electricity. Armageddon much! We had to vacate as it was apparently dangerous to still be in the service station. That pretty much decided us so we made the decision to turn around.

We were still hungry though so we stopped first at the service station across the road. After a meal fit for a King (KFC burgers and Burger King Ice Creams – yummy!) we headed back to London. Turns out we might as well have just stayed in the service station for a bit longer. Not only did it take us about two hours to get out of the car park, Jules and Sandra nearly came to blows with this dude who was in front of us and not letting people into the line of cars trying to get out. He was surprisingly agressive and wouldn’t even allow one inch of space between his car and the back of the car in front of him! Terribly unusual. Check out how much space he wasn’t letting in!

Finally we got out of the car park only to find that travelling on the motorway was even slower – it ended up taking about four hours to travel what must have been only about two or three miles!

So, after about eight hours of being on the road we ended up in the same spot that we started from Jules’ car park. Our journey was so thrilling I’ve put together the following compilation which includes footage of our drive on the way to the Lakes, the Armageddon that was the service station and then footage of our driving through flooded waters. All set to our theme song for the weekend Rihanna’s Umbrella:

Good times. I know you’re jealous.

We wrapped up the day with a delicious meal at Chutney’s in Uxbridge (which was delicious) and a visit to the cinema to see the latest Die Hard (yes the summer of sequels continues …) Review to follow eventually. The movie happened to finish just about midnight and so we were around to see the keen people lining up to get their copy of Harry Potter. I think the funniest aspect of the whole event was the people heading out for a night out clubbing or whatever jumping into the line to get their photo taken with the Harry Potter fans and then running off laughing hysterically.