(I often see huge birds as we drive along French roads and now British roads but I have never managed to get a picture – it took three drive-bys but I eventually got one picture of this bird of prey on a road in Buckinghamshire)

This has been a very busy trip with only small pockets of time to write. This pocket of time is very, very early. The rules would say it’s too early for a sane person on holiday to be awake. One could conclude I am either not awake, not on holidays or insane… or rules can be broken. We’re in Bath today. This will be our last stop before Swansea. We arrived yesterday about 6pm having instructed the sat nav. to stay off all toll roads, all motorways, all highways and to do so via Oxford. It duly obliged and although by the time we arrived in Bath we had been on the road for seven hours we had travelled through the most beautiful places.

(Iced tea and green tea at Polly’s famous tea shop on Marlborough high street – notice I got two tea pots, one with tea and one with extra hot water – like like like)

Every English television program and every movie I have ever seen must have been set on these roads and I relived my childhood as we rode along. Black Beauty could have trotted up beside us at a crossroads and I would not have been surprised. The two guys from Brideshead Revisited may well have passed us on a straight stretch. I definitely heard the voice of the posh guy in Four Weddings and a Funeral when we stopped for tea on Marlborough high street – could it be the town in Birds of a Feather?

(Bath is beautiful… we’ll be back)

The journey could not have been more different to the previous day when we instructed the sat nav. to take the shortest route, which turned out to be the A1 – a scary place full of big trucks and fast cars – but very efficient. On that day my knowledge of English geography grew exponentially. Not because we visited any of the places but because I was reading the road signs. We were on a mission to visit Bletchley Park where secret messages were decoded during World War II. There’s a museum of computing there also, because it turns out decoding led naturally to coding and so to computing.

(Didn’t realise it when I was taking the picture but between the wall in the foreground and the cathedral behind are the old Roman Baths, from which the city gets it’s name. Turns out the church owned the baths)

And all that gets me thinking about intention. I’m sitting on the bed in another lovely guest house at 5.30am because when we left Ireland last Thursday I intended to write every day of our trip. We found ourselves on the A1 because we intended to get to Bletchley Park in plenty of time to visit before it closed for the day. We travelled through my childhood television experiences because Denis loves to go round bends on the bike. We found ourselves in Bletchley Park because of all the old computers and strangely we also found ourselves together because of computers. We find ourselves in Bath because my friend, Nolene went there once two years ago on a pastry baking course and when she described Bath combined with pastry making, I was hooked and unconsciously setting my intention to be here.

Every place we find ourselves is because of an intention set, either consciously or unconsciously.

Where do you want to find yourself? Mairead.