It's a bank holiday weekend and I also had the Friday off work, so we decided to visit my sister who lives in Honiton. Which is usually around a 4 hour drive from Leicester. We left at lunch time on Friday and didn't arrive there until seven thirty. Not fun. Okay, first of all, I admit that partly I went wrong. Don't ask me how, I know the way to Devon, I've done it many times, yet for some reason as I left Leicester I wasn't thinking and I went on the M1 instead of the M69. Now this isn't a huge problem, the M1 goes South and it was easy enough to pick up the route from there, it maybe added about 15 minutes on. I didn't really mind either since it meant we spotted a Stargate!

Yes, that's right, I was quite surprised too, we were driving along a bit of the M6 that we wouldn't normally have been on and I saw a big circle with a ramp leading to it. As a joke I pointed, saying look a Stargate. I mean, I didn't know what else it could be, but thought a Stargate fairly unlikely. However, Matt was able to look at it in more detail as we passed and once we passed and he could see the other side he confirmed that it was indeed a Stargate. Very odd.

Anyway, after that we thought we needed to stop at a services. So we stopped at Hopwood Park on the M42. Not a service station I normally use and one that goes against my rule for service stations - I only go to ones that are one side of the motorway only so that you can't accidentally get back on going in the wrong direction. We thought it would probably be okay. Can you see where this is going?

So after our stop, we got back on the wrong side of the motorway, with no way to do anything about it, and had to go miles out of our way, This added maybe an extra 40 minutes or so, tut.

Right, so we're back on track, we're on the M5, it's M5 all the way now pretty much, for 150 miles or something. As we continue traffic gets worse and worse and signs start warning us of long delays. This is where we make the big mistake of the journey. I'm baking hot and just hating this feel of congestion on the motorway, so we think. "Let's come off the motorway." We have Sat Nav, she can find us a nice non-motorway route, according to her calculations when we ask her it will only take half an hour longer than if we stay on the motorway. About an hour later when she's been winding us through very busy, very narrow side roads and we really don't seem to have progressed far, we head back for the motorway. We've managed to progress 3 junctions in all the time we were gone. We stick out the motorway for the rest of the journey, yes it's not fast, but at least we're moving in the right direction and apart from an almost stationary patch for about an hour and a half around Bristol, it's not that bad.

Anyway, this is very boring, so I'll shut up about motorways and service stations. We got there in the end, I was feeling quite ill in the end from the heat, not a nice day to be stuck in a car for 7 hours, but still.

Saturday it was cold and rainy all day, which was a shame as it limited what we could do, we did some shopping and made some cupcakes. It would have been much better if the two days had been swapped over weather wise.

Saturday evening was Eurovision, which sadly my sister doesn't watch! She wanted to watch Britain's Got Talent :-( so we just got to watch Eurovision in the advert breaks and missed the disturbance on stage during Spain's performance. However, when it came to an hour through, she suddenly remembered that Britain's Got talent would be on ITV 2 the next day anyway! So she let us watch from song 10. None stuck in my head as amazing, I didn't really like Germany's winning entry. She seemed to be doing a very odd accent, like she didn't really know English that well, I would have preferred it in German.

On Sunday we went to Honiton Community Church. It seemed quite a nice, friendly church, about the size of ours. My sister didn't come with us though. We had lunch at hers, then Matt and I left, going via Exeter to briefly meet up with my brother and his ex-girlfriend for coffee at a service station.

The journey back was much quicker, mainly because we travelled back yesterday instead of on the bank holiday. We did it in under 4 hours, hooray. Got back and played scrabble for a bit, though I seemed to be having some annoying skill in picking up vowels constantly. If only EieiO was a real word outside of Old Macdonald.

I'm currently watching Matt play Uncharted 2, using the unlockable "Donut Drake" Where he's very overweight, it's slightly bizarre and distracting.

I might go and do some quilting now, I've got a baby quilt that I want to finish by 19th June as the person it's for is visiting then. Then I need to really get cracking on a large quilt to finish for October.