U.K. Duty Visit - Day 21

Quite surprisingly the daylight portion of this day was largely sunny, although it was extremely and unrelentingly windy as well. I spent much of the morning in packing exercises trying to keep my “to be checked” bags within weight limits without making my carry-on overflow bag too heavy to be easily managed. Pam & Nick were also confined to barracks awaiting the first delivery of the materials for the flat upgrade Nick will supervise prior to the flat going on to the market. The stuff finally came, short two washbasins and during the unloading the delivery people dropped a porcelain toilet onto the tarmac & smashed it! Their problem, our inconvenience.

With all that behind us we took off heading west on the “main road” as far as the Cuckmere River estuary, once winding & pretty and now oxbow lakes and a straight man-made channel on the last dash to the sea. We scrambled to find two pounds fifty for two hours (or less) of parking but were delighted to find the Pay And Display machine was out of order! We then trod delicately across a fair bit of grass, watching our feet until we reached the concrete footpath/road where we also found we had to watch our feet and tread delicately. The many sheep grazing in the area almost totally ignored us. We marched bravely into the headwind until the concrete path degenerated to roughly leveled chalk, still very wet, and shortly decided discretion was the better part of valor.

Back near the car we eschewed the shortcut & walked around, climbed in the car and rejoined the road taking our place in the line waiting for the eastbound traffic to end over the classic British “two-direction, one lane” bridge to the Golden Galleon pub on the other side, in which we had a very nice lunch sitting next to a real wood fire. On leaving we took the “scenic route” down even smaller roads coming out at Polegate where we stopped for Nick to sort out the delivery shortages/accidents, prior to going on to the nursing home.

Mum-Mum was quite bright today and stayed so even when she finally realized that this was the last visit from both Pam & me. We stayed quite a long time, as usual doing crosswords to fill in the conversational gaps and repetitions. We eventually took our leave with remarkably little emotional outbursts or guilt trips & drove home, to spend a quiet evening before a very early morning tomorrow.