Mileage (Part Two)

So, yesterday – all told it involved 310 miles, 8 hours of driving, and one exceptionally knackered Lyle.

The drive down to Wokingham from home was OK, not too painful (even on the M25, which was slow but not abysmal) and I did it in 2.5 hours all told. Drop off Hound at her place of residence for the next week, have some lunch, and it’s half three. So I decide I’ll head over to Greenwich and the O2.

It’s at that point that I realise I haven’t got the normal sat-nav in the car. I had it the day before for the drive to Welwyn Garden City, then Herself used it in the evening, and I’d forgotten to make sure I got it back. Oh bollocks.

So instead I had to trust the POS sat-nav thing on my phone – a heap of crap called Wayfinder. And Jesus H Christ on a warped pine crutch, it really is a piece of shit. First of all it took no less than fifteen minutes to find where the fuck it was – although that may be a fault of the phone’s GPS rather than Wayfinder. However, the fact that it was consistently 400 ft out was entirely the fault of Wayfinder, and meant that it had a nasty habit of saying “Oh, you wanted to turn left back there“. Now I’m sure that’s fine out in the arse of beyond where 400 ft doesn’t mean a thing – but in central London, 400 ft is the equivalent of about six roads.

Wayfinder also wanted me to go some deeply surreal routes.  My original idea had been to go southbound (anticlockwise) round the M25 from the M4, get to the junction for (probably) the A2, and belt straight up to Greenwich – probably the longer and (in theory) quicker route. Only (as usual for the M25 on a Friday) it was jammed solid for about six junctions. Fuck that, thinketh I. (And bear in mind here, Wayfinder was trying to tell me to go northbound on the M25 instead)

So – straight along the M4, into the city, through. Only that was buggered too. (And Wayfinder kept planning on taking me back north of the river for some fuckforsaken reason)

So – round the infamous South Circular Road. I know a bit of it, but not all of it, so I might have to rely on satnav a bit. And there laid my biggest mistake of all. Because Wayfinder didn’t want me to take the simple South Circular (A205) route round to the A2. It wanted to take me the tourist way (and also possibly to get up to the M40 and go through from there). Every fucking time. And be 400 ft out in its estimations. All the fucking way round.

Eventually I gave up on it, once it tried taking me through Elephant and Castle.

From there, and pretty epically lost – I knew very roughly where I was, where I needed to be, and roughly the roads I needed to take – I finally found myself, got back on the road I wanted, and once I’d done that it was a 30 minute run through to the O2 itself. I should have been able to do the route in 90 minutes, give or take – maybe 2 hours in shitty rush-hour traffic.

Instead, because of the cuntbrick piece of shit satnav software, it took me three and a half bollocking hours to do fifty miles. Yeah, go on and laugh, fuckers.

By contrast, the drive home was two hours door-to-door, and belted past. We got home at 1:15.

I’ll write more about the Pink concert itself later or tomorrow – but for now let’s just say it was fan-bloody-tastic. Well impressed all round.