The English Countryside with Car and Map

Since arriving in Europe I've had wifi connectivity, battery draining, blog formatting issues (it makes my skin crawl when pictures and text are not aligned) and I'm about ready to throw my phone out the window and jump up and down on my iPad. Ok I'm done complaining--but now you know why we only had a map when leaving London.

We had one goal for the day: visit Jane Austen's house in Chawton about 1.5 hours outside London. It may take others less time to drive but we took a few "detours". Miss Austen is the author of my all time favorite book, Pride and Prejudice. So why not visit during the year of its 200th anniversary. It was lovely and quaint but this quote pretty much sums up the rest of the day's activities.

We totally had a spontaneous change of plans and it was a thrill. We had planned to visit a historic building (which i cannot rember the name of) when I saw a certain estate on the map about 30 minutes away. Ok I didn't know it was 30 minutes away, remember, the tech stuff is not working so well, it was about 6 inches away from our current location so that was a guess. We had really wanted to go to this estate but an all day trip was ruled out because it's closed. But we said, "if we are this close now we have to go and at least try to see Highclere Castle"!
We found it.
Yes we were giddy schoolgirls. All you Downton Abbey fans know exactly what I mean. Here we are facing a field of sheep hoping no one kicks us off the grounds.

Next random destination, Oxford. We had an hour before everything closed, wasting half of it because we didn't trust a certain map (no surprise why neither of us went to Oxford) but then we found this at Christchurch. Look familiar?

Now back to London in the dark...
Driving in central London on the WRONG side of the road, narrow one way streets, pedestrians, busses that don't fit, street signs either too low or too long to read unless you get out of the car and look. Taxi please! So when my iPad map started working during the trickiest part of the journey my sister and I both said, "this is a miracle", seriously.

Last but not least if you see a sign in the English countryside which reads "oncoming traffic may be in the middle of the road" then around the next bend oncoming traffic just may be in the middle of the road in the form of a red double decker tour bus. Ahh!