Leicester Adventure: Crossing of the First Threshold, My Magical Mystery Tour

Saturday

My alarm clock decided on waking me at 6 am sharp. I had ordered it to do so; I wanted to be up at the same time as my mum and step-dad so I could oversee the final packing and catering procedure. It therefore sort of dismayed me that I heard the car doors slam shut as I was putting on my sweater, meaning that somehow they had managed to be up before me and managed to put nearly everything in the car, except for my winter coat and my umbrella. But then I remembered that this also meant that I would not have to worry about any of that, and I felt grateful. We left for Calais at 7 am, and I unfolded my favourite in-car items as we left Hellevoetsluis; the maps. We have no need for maps, as we have, like every other civilized family, a GPS device, but I have been taught to read maps when I was just a little girl and this has left me with a strange sense of joy whenever I get to pore over maps and figure out ways and destinations. Dawn did not properly happen until we were near Barendrecht, but that's okay because I prefer the maps of Belgium and England because I haven't been there nearly as often.

Maps also work nicely to cover up the mess I made of the back seat since I'd been put in control of the in-car catering and I just stuck everything back in the bag without looking.

We arrived in Calais more than an hour early, but I guess the whole matter of the Sussex maths teacher and his 15-year-old pupil have left the border agents a bit spooked because somehow the queues managed to move so slowly that we were just in time to get on our ferry.

The weather was so wondrously clear that even at Calais, you could see all the way to the cliffs of Dover.

This made the 22-mile-crossing seem lots shorter than it was – I spent nearly all of it outside, as if trying to reach out for the whiteness at the horizon to try and pull myself towards it. Funnily, all three of us left the ferry feeling a bit queasy, my step-dad because he just can't deal with rolling waves and my mum and me because we both felt that the correction of the boat – it has stabilizers, of course – didn't allow our balancing systems to work, thus upsetting us as though we were both landsick (I didn't actually know landsickness could be hereditary, but my mum and my brother also get sick after being on rolling waves rather than actually getting seasick at that time). 

But arriving at Dover was brilliant, seeing those white cliffs up close (I'd never seen them before, always crossing more northerly, to Hull or at one time even Newcastle). And I immediately got to realize what I've realized many times before but seem to always forget – England is bad puns galore. There was this one B&B or pub or something called The Chalk of the Town. Very punny. The only good thing (for entrepreneurs) about bad puns is that they're far more difficult to forget than good puns because good puns only make you chuckle instead of cringe.

We drove to Ashford, to a Tesco there, where I bought an electric kettle because my old one I'd left in Middelburg and I didn't want to buy one in the Netherlands because it would have the wrong plug. Then up to London, and via Cambridge because we wanted to avoid the M1. My step-dad and I had a bit of fun over saying 'pretentious elitist wankers' at the spires at the horizon.

A bit of a mix-up happened right after Cambridge, because we'd discussed the route a number of times and there never was any clarity on whether we'd go via Peterborough or Kettering. The GPS wanted to send us via Peterborough, but seeing as I was reading the map I saw that those roads were not as good as the ones via Kettering. It worked out fine in the end, as we ended up going via Kettering, driving into Leicester from the South-East, so via Oadby. Oadby is very English, very pretty. In fact, all of Leicestershire is the typical sort of English that you'd imagine – rolling green hills, rickety fences, cottages, small villages with pubs called 'The Wild Boar' or 'The Red Lion'. We drove through Leicester – something my step-dad didn't really like, to north Leicester to find a chip shop called The Codfather (puns galore!). I did not feel in the mood for fish & chips, because I'm not that fond of fish really, but they also had a good chicken&mushroom pie, so I had pie & chips instead. Finally, we were to end our day in a B&B just north of Leicester, but something had gone wrong there. The people of the B&B were very pleasant, but there'd been a mix-up in the reservation so they only had a double room left. I got to sleep in a big room with a genuinely massive bathroom in a side-of-the-road hotel just off the A6 instead, while my mum and step-dad took up the offer of the double room in the B&B. The B&B people apologized a million times, and really, stuff like this can happen and seeing as I was waiting for something to go wrong, I can live with this being the one thing that does so.

Sunday

Somehow, I'd managed to mess up the changing of the times on my phone and so it did not wake me up at 7am as I'd wanted it to. Instead, some nightmare that I forgot right after shook me awake at 7:22, so I rushed out into the hotel's breakfast area, worked down some toast with raspberry jam and some orange juice, and stuffed my laptop back in the bag – I'd hoped the hotel had wifi, but alas – and then flopped down back on the double bed to watch BBC's breakfast news.

Mum and Willem pretended to be room-service at 8:45, after which we drove through Leicester, back to Oadby, so we could pick up the key for my room. My arrival instructions had 9:30 on them, but we were there at 9:10. The people didn't care, I got my key.

The Mary Gee campus is quite pretty. Very green. The rooms themselves are fairly forgettable, as they are just the basics – a desk, a wardrobe, a bed and a night stand. And two bookshelves, which are just about able to hold the books I brought. It's green enough for squirrels to bounce about.

We unloaded the car and then set off for the nearby Asda superstore for some groceries – I needed to have drinks &c. - and then to Sainsbury's for some early lunch. Listening to Midlands English and comparing it to my own made me realise that RA English really has some very strong American influences. Drove back into Leicester to see the Uni campus, which is big but nice and, for reference, holds the middle between the massive Erasmus Uni Rotterdam campus and the miniature Roosevelt Academy campus, but leans towards EUR-size. Then back to Mary Gee, and my mum trying her best not to do an emotional goodbye.

So here I sit. Writing, feeling content. It's all worked out, hasn't it?