Abbey road (UK 2009, part 8/8)

London, Gatwick airport, 5 July 2009
Today we checked out of our hotel in Hastings, to stay at an airport hotel since we have an early flight tomorrow.

On the way to London, we stopped at Bayham Abbey, a small but picturesque ruin along the Kent/Sussex border. There's a somewhat ancient beech tree overgrowing some of the ruins, which gives a bit of an idea of just how long it had been that way. An 18th century house also stands on the grounds, with two rooms accessible to visitors that talked about the Premonstratensians, the monastic order whose abbey it was.

After spending an hour or so exploring on a pleasant sunny day, we continued on toward Gatwick, opting to take the scenic route (in this case, the A264) instead of heading all the way up the A21 to the London ring road and back down. As it turns out, this was a wise move on multiple counts - an accident had traffic stalled for hours on the M25 clockwise, which is the way we would have gone.

The downside of the scenic route is that DD is prone to carsickness, and even with the ginger beer that we'd been using to stave that off the past few days, we needed to stop again. This time, for lunch at a pub in Crawley called The Duke's Head. The food was quite good, and they offered a rather nice cider (Aspall) that was new to me.

Back on the road, we arrived safely at Gatwick and are preparing for tomorrow's flight home.

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That concludes my journal - hope you enjoyed it! More pictures can be found at http://www.clioratha.net/galleries.