Garnet's Life Adventures

Destination Cranleigh

So as I'm sure you can all guess it's nice to get the beck out of London every once in awhile. When you don't have a car & don't know your way around outside of London this can present a problem at times. LUCKILY for me, my dear friend Katie, offered me the chance to go on a little country side ramp today. I got the 11.11 Thameslink to Mitchen Junction where Katie picked me up. We took a few minutes to look at the Surrey A to Z map and then off we went towards Dorking (funny name huh???) we stopped off first at Denbie's Wine Estate it's a beautiful location, of course this wasn't the ideal time of year to view the vineyard, but we perused the gift shop and made 2 purchases, Surry Gold & Juniper Hill.

From there we attempted to get ourselves to Cranleigh - I was attempting to be a co-pilot, but this is a difficult job when roads in England don't have street signs or numbers just an arrow with a destination so you sorta have to know what towns are before and after that town you want so you'll know which road to take - seeing as I've never been this far south in England I hadn't got a bloody clue what to look for. We choose a road that looked promising until it started to get really really narrow like this.

Interesting thing to note about this road, aside from how narrow it is, is that the fastest you can go is "the national speed limit" which is 70mph, imagine doing that speed down this road - we had a hard time going 35mph!!

Okay, back to this road that we thought was what we wanted . . . well as you've probably guessed by now, it wasn't the correct road at all, but we did see this sign with a full parking lot, so we just had to stop and take a photo!

By this time it was about 2.20pm and we were getting hungry, so we decided to pop in & see what it was all about.

We walked in & were both immediately impressed by the fire with real wood in the corner next to the bar. We made our way over, found a few menus & plopped our butts on the bar stools just next to the fireplace. Katie ordered the fish & chips with half pint of Guinness. I decided to try the Steak & Guinness cobbler with a pint of lemonade (like Sprite). It was a divine meal!! We were also able to get updates on the rugby without having to sit in the room where the telly was with all the men who were chain smoking. For dessert we had sticky toffee pudding, YUM!!!! On our way out we realized they have a little garden with outdoor seating.

Cool car we saw in the parking lot - interesting flag design to have over here!

Cool old route master bus that was in the parking lot as well

Once back in the car we were able to figure out where on the map we were & sorta map out a plan of how to get to Cranleigh. About 15 minutes, 2 wrong turns, and a short cut (but no stopping to ask for directions) we found ourselves in the lovely town of Cranleigh, SUCCESS!!!

We parked the car in a lot just off the high street & took a little walk about checking out all the stores. We each bought a leather purse for £5, goour errandssss run at SuperDrug & the mum'n'pop book/card shop.

After hitting up both sides of the high street we decided to head home - it was getting dark, we didn't know our way very well & it would be hard to read a map in the dark!!Impressivelyly we made it home in about 1.25 hours without lifting the map off the floor of my seat - just instinct & a few minor road signs.

When we got back to Katie's house we decided to watch something on the telly, luckily thOlympicscs were being shown live, so we watched ice skating & the men's second luge run. Katie & I decided to have blueberry pancakes with Adirondack maple syrup for dinner. It was so good!! As we both said, just what the doctor ordered for the ending to our relaxing out of London day!

I got the Northern line back home which started out running on time & in the direction I wanted, but as we got closer & closer it kept changing it's final destinationon, so I got stuck having to switch to the High Barnet branch at Camden station in order to get home, but that just meant standing around on the platform for an extra 10 minutes!

posted by Sara @ 12:52 am