2012 England postcript

So, before we embark on another absurdly-after-the-fact blog about the Dead Englishmen Tour 2 (for which we are actually well-prepared this time, both of us having recorded a modest sheaf of real-time notes), we wanted to officially close out the notes from 2012. One last little detail....

You may recall (and in case you don't it's here) that after getting squeezed and hustled and bullied and generally shaken-not-stirred driving out of London, we finally made it to the A1 and headed toward The North, and York specifically, with a stop in Lincolnshire along the way.

"But that little walkabout wasn't done with us."

No indeed...about three weeks after we returned, a curious entry showed up on my credit card, about $250 charged by our friends at EuropCar. I contacted our friend Gavin at the travel service. He got back in a few days and indicated (although I knew it all along) that the charge was slapped on EuropCar by the traffic lords of London, who spotted us with one of their cameras wobbling hopelessly into the dreaded rush hour Congestion Zone without a permit, during our utterly ridiculous Lost in London adventure.

We had had a feeling that we committed this infraction; we spotted one of their toxic-looking Congestion Zone signs in a sudden left turn, one of many we took that morning just because we were there, not because we had any idea what we were doing, and honestly, we checked online (and Anna, the girl behind the desk at Thornbury Castle also checked) to see if we really had crossed that sinister meridian. Neither of our inquiries seemed to show up, so we thought, eh, maybe it was an illusion.

But no. Busted.

We could have fought it, I suppose, insisting that we tried - really, we did - to put this right while on English soil, but the mind reels at the time/expense/paperwork involved in such an appeal, and we probably would have lost and owed the money plus interest anyway. Fighting City Hall is often an exercise in fruitless windmill-jousting, and doing it across The Pond, before guys in wigs, was no appealing prospect.

In any case, that and the flat tire ended up costing us an unplanned $450 or so. Not crushing when counted against the rest of the trip, which was right about or slightly under-budget anyway, and a lesson was learned.

A lesson, we'll add here, we put into good use for DET2, and from which, ironically, we were well-thwarted anyway. As we will soon see....