Event 28: "You have reached your destination"

I went to Manchester for a friend's wedding last weekend. Wedding's are usually good, but this one was particularly good. We got sausage sandwiches, hob nobs, haribo and Christmas dinner. I got to catch up with lots of old uni friends and camp friends. And best of all, I got to meet the husband of one of my best friends and find out just what a lovely man she had chosen to marry.

Manchester is quite a long way from Cambridge. Fact. This meant a very early start. I travelled with some very funny (as in 'ha ha' not strange) friends from church which made the journey so much nicer. We had breakfast half way and we even arrived early enough to sit in the car and taken online autism tests before we needed to get changed and go in. Anna is very autistic. Susan is not.

Good service. Great reception. We waved off the happy couple and hopped back in the car, ready for the 10 min drive out to the place we were staying. Sat nav wasn't playing game. Apparently it couldn't find any satellites. But no worries, Richard soon had Susan's phone on and was trying to work out how to use the GPS function. That proved a little tricky, but no worries, Richard's phone soon brought up google maps. Meanwhile, I got a map out of the boot...

We eventually worked out where we were and where we were going and how to get from one to the other. Sat nav woke up (found that elusive satellite) and Ken was soon telling us to "turn left in 300 yards." A few tricky junctions later and sat nav announced that we had reached our destination. We hadn't. Centre of Manchester, late at night, we pulled into a garage to find some youths kicking a football and a family, with some children that really should have been in bed, buying a late night snack. A phonecall and several trips up and down the same road later, we pulled into an unlit residential area with glass all over the floor. We feared that might be the last we saw of the car.

The place was actually ok. We had a good night's sleep, made the most of the all you can eat breakfast (Richard won, having cereal, orange juice, apple juice, 2 slices of toast, 3 croisants and a coffee) and there wasn't even a scratch on the car. And we made it home safely, despite an unprovoked attack from a low flying suicidal pigeon.

I learnt a lot about my travelling companions during the weekend. Susan is good at driving round difficult junctions, staying calm in the face of misplaced pigeons and eats an awful lot of nutrigrain bars. Anna is 80% autistic, which is no bad thing (it can come in useful when you need to know the postcodes of several destinations), and can explain the science behind traffic jams. And Richard can eat an incredible amount of breakfast for his size.