South England

After about 2 hours on the Chunnel between France and England, we ended up in the st. Pancreatic train station in London. It took us a few minutes to get oriented and pick up a phone card and then we were off to the car rental.

Believe it or not we arrived at the car rental store at 4:03. We were three minutes late. They had shut down the system and we were plain out of luck.

Thank goodness for the Internet and phone card. It only took us a few minutes and we had found an extremely reasonably priced hotel less than 10 minutes walk from the car rental store.

 It was only 10 minutes from the train station.

However this was the very last room. Sure enough it had beds for all four of us, but they were all in the same room!

This meant for a somewhat cozy night!!

In the morning the hotel treated us to a full course breakfast. It was amazing with everything from cereal juice eggs to toast and more.

After breakfast we are headed to the car rental store. For some reason we were upgraded to a very sporty Volvo four-door with every option including GPS.

After some tense moments of learning how to drive on the left-hand side of the road and understanding how to maneuver the wrong way around a multilane turned out, we finally made it to Hastings and then Brighton 

Brighton pier. 1,770 ft long with a carnival  atmosphere. 

This time our hotel was a truly nice. Two very nice rooms and we were only hundred and 50 yards from the water. Also it included a wonderful breakfast in the morning.

Roman Catholic cathedral in erin dale

Driving in this part of England is definitely a test of one's patients. The roads are narrow quite busy, and there is a roundabout every 2 to 5 miles. We could not begin to count all the turnarounds that we had to navigate.

Lunch was at a fabulous English Inn in a town that dated back to 1067, where William the conqueror gave a parcel of land to one of his supporters. He built Erindale castle and a small city evolved around it.  The castle is truly a must see, but wouldn't you believe it we arrived on a Monday. That is the only day that the castle is shut down.

A short while later we called at a day and found our destination--the 500 year old White Heart Inn.