So much for trying to get to bed early – it’s now well past my bed time and instead of being tucked up dreaming about our holiday I’m sitting beside Mike agreeing detailed route planning. We’ve left Vancouver, passed Mount Vernon, Seattle and are heading towards Portland now. We could have saved a fortune and done this trip from Mike’s study! There was me thinking that the marvellous Garmin device would take the trouble out of navigation – but it seems to me to be just as much hard work. (Mike note – the Garmin gps will work out routes for us, but it might not direct us the best way – so it’s better to do it manually). Hopefully this attention to detail will mean that when we get to the States we’ll glide along with no wrong turns, missed turns, travelling in the wrong direction etc, etc.(some hope!).

I confess that many a family holiday of my youth ended in a few heated words after navigation malfunctions, (and this was well before the invention of sat nav). My dad used to produce charts with every significant junction listed with an estimated time of arrival (eta). The ‘designated navigator’ was supposed to write down next to the eta the exact time of arrival so that upon arrival my dad could calculate the accuracy of the journey plan. This seemed to work reasonably well until everyone except the driver had fallen asleep, (it was normal for us to depart from home on our family holidays at about 2am to ‘beat the traffic’). I was left scarred mentally, although surprisingly not physically injured, after one incident where we were well and truly lost, (where exactly on mainland Europe I do not recall). My dad lost his temper and after consuming his cup of tea threw his bakerlite mug into the air only, by some freak chance, for it to come down right on my head – and I wasn’t even navigating. I think he felt quite guilty about it at the time and so he should, nobody should treat a bakerlite mug like that. So with the marvels of modern technology we should have no incidents of that kind!