Solihull

Monday, Jill & I drove up to Solihull to visit with Gavin and Helen who are on their annual pilgrimage back to civilization from down under! You can see their travels here; http://hallingholidays.blogspot.com/ . We left Reigate at 9:30am and it took us about 2 hours to get up to Solihull; the only problem being that the address Gavin gave me for Helen's sister Jo wasn't on my GPS! However, a quick phone call and we changed Berry to Bury and we were back on track! The last time Jill & I were in Solihull was 36 years ago at Gavin and Helen's wedding!

After a quick cup of tea we all set of for downtown Solihull in search of lunch passing this wonderful statue and flower display;
We settled on the Fat Cat for lunch;

Lunch turned out to be long affair! Seated at 1pm and left at 4:30pm! We had a great meal and had a great time catching up with each other since our last time together in Alaska in 2006. As you can see, we were able to eat outside in what used to be the High Street and is now a pedestrian mall.

The church where Gavin & Helen were married, St. Alphege, just happened to be across the road from the Fat Cat so we trooped across the road and took a photo;

By now it was time to start thinking about dinner! Helen had called her sister Jo and we had agreed to drop into John Lewis to ask her daughter Becky if she wanted to join all of us for dinner. So off to John Lewis and we found Becky in the children's department and she was up for dinner also.

We then walked back to Jo's and once Becky got back from work we set off for the Boot Inn for dinner. The Boot Inn is very close to the Stratford canal and so I took a couple of pictures before dinner.

We sat in the garden for dinner; 2 meals in England in one day seated outside!!!!!


Dinner turned out to take longer than planned so Jill & I set off for Reigate from the pub; Gavin was taking his lease vehicle back to Calais on Tuesday so we had asked Beryl if it would be OK for him to drive down to Reigate on Monday night and then have a shorter trip to Dover in the morning; Beryl had said yes, but Gavin need to catch up with his nephew Phil before driving down, so he followed us into Reigate about an hour after us.

Beryl had stayed up well past her bedtime and she and Gavin had a great time catching up with each other. Then as Zebedee said, it was time for bed, as Gavin had a 7:30am start on Tuesday, much better than is original 5am start!