This is part of the seventeenth section of our
around the world trip.
Complete Trip Overview &
Map
Coming from Ireland or read
our previous visit to The United Kingdom
windswept, bleak, but filling all the same with mid term
school holiday makers. Most come to the mountains for the walks, and
each carpark overfull, their occupants strolling one of the many public
walkways, alongside streams or stretching it out over a mountain pass.
We returned to our hotel mid afternoon and enjoyed a bottle of wine in
the bar to round off a pleasant day. 
in four days time.
Obviously these days it is not worth the hassle of sending packages by
ocean freight. Some of the parts are original, the
exhausts, sentimental and perhaps museum appeal, whilst others are more
practical spares, worn but not worn out. A late beer down at the local
town hall after dinner with Paul and Stephen rounded off the day.
down the
shaft and into the engine compartment. At least that is all we can work
out as this was the only change and now the problem, thankfully, has
been resolved. It was when we were in Coventry last time that I
realised that 1984 has arrived, albeit a bit late. Outside the hotel
where we had previously stayed, at
the rear entrance, where the maids and guests stand for a smoke, there
is a camera, below which is a notice stating that video and audio were
being recorded. Audio, yes, audio, meaning anything anyone said could
be forever kept, and facial recognition is either here or coming,
paranoid,
perhaps not yet, but I will certainly be more cautious about what I say
in "private". Recently there have been reports of CCTV cameras in
student change rooms and that laptops provided by a school had been
programed to activate the laptop's camera, sending images back to the
school for
student monitoring, quite an invasion of privacy. What next? 
obtaining
an invitation we could obtain a visa at any Russian embassy, but alas
the regulations had changed. This need to obtain a visa in your home
country is starting to creep into some countries visa requirements and,
like the need to have an onward airline ticket, will likely slowly
strangle
spontaneous overland travel. Said goodbye to Stephen and Sheryl,
visited Merv and Ruth for morning tea, and rode down the highway to
Folkestone on the coast near Dover for tomorrows ferry crossing.
Folkestone has lost its former glory but people still come here for a
day at the beach or a cheap holiday weekend and today, in lovely
weather, the coastal walkway was crowded on the last weekend of the mid
spring holidays.
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