The Sphere Effect

Well, anyone who knows me well, knows I’m a bit precious about Easter. It is to me the most important weekend in the year and I was desparate to somehow have a very special Easter in England.

So I had a good chat with my friend Kath (that I met in France) and we decided to hire a car and to drive up to York.

Well! What a drama! We went to pick up the car on the Easter Thursday night. The idea was that we were going to leave at 4.30am on Good Friday morning, in order to get up to York by 11am to see an Easter Play that was being done in the York Minster Cathedral.

When we got into our car at Victoria Station we said a little prayer for Angels to surround our car, and then set off for a church service at Holy Trinity Brompton. The church service was nice (but a little average) but the very exciting thing is that when we got back in the car we managed to stall it in the parking lot, and nearly didn’t get it started again. Then I looked down at the odometer and realised it had only done 13 miles. They had given us a BRAND NEW Ford Focus. Excitement plus!!.. except that all the lights on the dashboard started flashing and we couldn’t get the stereo working. UH OH! NOT GOOD.

Took it back to Kath’s house in Acton Town, and after I turned it off, I tried to restart it. Dead as a doornail. We called the AA and he came out to have a look. Apparently the alternator (whatever that is) was completely dead - and the car would have to be returned. By this time it was 11pm, just 5 and a half hours before we were to leave.

Hertz told us that we should arrange for the car to be recoved, and then go to the Heathrow depot where they would issue us a new car. The AA man arranged for a recovered and then drove us to Heathrow. When we go there, we were told we couldn’t have a new car until the old car was brought in, which was going to take 6 HOURS because we were no longer with the vehicle. ARGHHH.

So Mr AA Man drove us back to Kath’s house (40 mins drive) so we could wait with the car, because apparently it would be a shorter wait of 2 hours. We lay down and got some sleep thinking that at any moment the AA would arrive. They never did, but we got some good sleep until 4.30am when the alarm went off. Very worried we called AA who had lost our booking. Then they finally said they were sending someone around. Then we called Hertz who told us they had run out of cars. We had been relatively calm up to this point, but now we were starting to get a bit grumpy. What else could possibly go wrong? We finally talked to a supervisor at Hertz who found a car for us.

Then we go into the tow truck with our car on the back. On the way to the airport, the cable fell off the back of the tow truck and got run over, which mean that the tow truck man couldn’t get the car off. We sat on the edge of the road for half an hour while he grunted and swore. By this time we were giggling hysterically, as there really wasn’t too much more that could go wrong. I was convinced that we were being held up so that we wouldn’t be in some horrific accident somewhere, after all, we had asked God to protect us hadn’t we?

Anyway we finally got our new (slightly older) Ford Focus at about 7am, and merrily made our way up to York. I would just like to say that there was absolutely NO traffic anywhere on the roads. Everyone else had been too scared to drive on the Monday morning and so had driven on the Thursday evening - apparently there had been terrible traffic the night before.

We made it to York in short order and saw a fantastic passion play in Yorkminster. We spent the rest of that day resting after our traumatic ordeal, but got to see a bit more of the city the next day.

This is Kath standing outside Yorkminster (we got the artistic effect of looking through the trees).

In the afternoon we went for a drive through the Yorkshire Dales and looked at some old ruined abbeys.

We visited St Michael of the Belfry church on the Easter Sunday morning which was absolutely lovely, and made our way home in the afternoon after having Roast Dinner with Yorkshire pudding, which is of course something you must do in York.

And the end of our car story? Well we didn’t have much money to begin with. When we took the car back in and told them our story with much laughter, they were so impressed with our loveliness and our terrible story, that they gave us the whole car hire for FREE! How good is that??? God looks after his own!! And kept us cheerful for the whole way through!