The familar route to Cornwall. The M4 seems to have been around forever but I was surprised to find out that the main London to Bristol bit was only completed in 1971. I remember as a child thinking motorways were so amazing and futuristic and you could drive your car really really fast, except ours was really slow, and I loved the service stations, especially the one by the Severn Bridge. They're still quite appealing in a strange, mass pit-stop sort of way, now with half-decent food as well as the ubiquitous fruit-machines and men selling AA membership.
Motorway travel is of course boring as hell, but at least it gives us the chance, squashed together in our Nissan Micra, to talk, undisatracted, and listen to stuff: Raoul Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox and the Pet Shop Boys as it turned out. As the M5 morphs into the A38 we hurtle towards Plymouth and then over the Tamar Bridge, built (it says proudly on the towers) in 1961, the year I was born, into Cornwall and 13 miles later we're in Liskeard, 'home' for the next fortnight.
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