Saturday October 30, 2004

Around the M25 in seven days...

Sometimes when you are on the M25 London Orbital motorway you feel you might spend seven days going round the bit you want to travel on, but on our way there and back to our holiday in Barcelona we did go round the whole thing - in seven days...

First from home we joined the M40 then the M25. This is just north of the roadworks where the M25 is being widened again..

We then continued all the way around to the M11 junction ( where there are even more roadworks) to come off there and head to the excellent pub run by Jamie Oliver's parents The Cricketers at Clavering . We had two nights there with this wonderful meal on the Saturday:

Dinner is 21.50 for two courses (which comes with a nice selection of breads). I had a wonderful boneless quail marinated on stir fried bok choi with a light soy sauce dressing. I then had a stonking great lump of halibut with a shellfish and mussel bisque. Best halibut I have ever had.

My wife had char grilled fillet steak with a cream mushroom sauce and a dessert the details of which escape me! The rooms and breakfast are both excellent.

On our travels once more we rejoined the M11 down to the M25 and then continued over the new Queen Elizabeth bridge This supplements the Dartford tunnel which is used by the anti clockwise traffic.

Finally we came off onto the M23 heading to Gatwick.

On our return from Barcelona we enjoyed the M25 at its best - Friday rush hour. As expected despite the MIDAS (Motorway Incident Detection and Automatic Signalling) system things were pretty jammed up. MIDAS consists of a distributed network of traffic and weather sensors, speed cameras and variable speed signs which control traffic speeds with little human supervision. Going through the widening works it was good to see even at 7pm work still going on. As it happens it must be easier to extend the carriagway on one side of the road so they added all the extra lanes there. The central reservation then needs to be moved and to do this they were using an enormous circular saw to cut through the tarmac and concrete. Following on from this was other machinery breaking up the tarmac/concrete.

Coming from the south we can leave the M25 on the M4 junction and get home as easily as using the M40 and avoid some of the jams. So we did not exactly go round ALL of the M25.