Getting Home (by alaric)
Today, we went down to Bristol to visit Costco and stock up on baby supplies, and to have an outing in the city centre itself.
It was a lovely place to explore, but I was a bit sad - I remember visiting there about 15 years ago and there being a road with loads of big academic bookshops on near the University; but when we went there today, there was just a single small Blackwells. The others had been replaced with clothes shops, shoe shops, and hairdressers, it seemed.
Still, at the end of the day, we headed back up the M5 with Jean asleep. As we approached junction 11A, I commented that we were nearly home - it was just about ten minutes from there. We took the junction, went along the A417 one junction to the A46, but at Crosshands Roundabout - the exit to continue up the A46 was coned off. "ROAD CLOSED - ACCIDENT".
Cor blimey. So we turned right and went on a 20-minute detour through Gloucester to get to Upton St Leonards to try and go up Portway (including getting lost in a housing estate trying to find a shortcut). And lo, Portway was closed for roadworks - in hindsight, I remember seeing a sign about there being roadworks planned there, but I'd ignored it since I had no plans to go into Gloucester for the affected period. Oops!
So we looped around again, and instead went up the road from Gloucester to Painswich, then drove over the top of Painswick Beacon to get back onto the A46 from the other side of Cranham. We drove north, but just after the Royal William - a stone's throw from the turning down into our lane - the road was blocked, with a police van parked across the road and signs up.
Uhoh. Looks like it was a bad accident.
So I turned around, and we drove back down the A46, then left to Sheepscombe, through a load of windy lanes and into Cranham from yet another direction. We got home then - at last!
Jean slept through the whole lot, even the pothole-ridden winding lanes...
Sat 23rd Sep 2006 10:49 pm 
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By Sarah, Mon 25th Sep 2006 @ 10:08 am
Unfortunatly we have disovered that it was a fatal accident for a motocylist at Cranham corner - people in the village are sad as some of them stoped the traffic and called the ambulance etc...