Over the past 6 years we’ve seen technology change our lives. I’m probably an unusually early adopter of a lot of technologies because I work in the field, but I wonder how other people have found technology helping them in a medical aspect.
At home, I’ve used the Internet to learn – googling unknown terms, reading blogs with ECG challenges, learning about the body’s processes and how we affect those. I’ve researched specific conditions or drugs that I’ve come across and am unfamiliar with. I’ve witnessed discussions on blogs and on twitter that have made me think about my treatment, my handling of patients as well as conditions that I come across.
Out in the field, I’ve used my Blackberry to great effect:
- Drugs – I’ve looked up drugs that I’m not familiar with and some that even the paramedic on scene hasn’t seen before. There’s an enormous array of drugs out there and it’s important for us to be able to find out some key information.
- Conditions – we frequently attend to transport patients who have been diagnosed by their GP. Not only are Doctor’s handwriting notoriously bad, but they on occasion use terminology I’m not familiar with. A quick google normally sorts that out and gives me a better understanding of the patient’s condition and how to treat them for the short time they’re with us. I have even, on occasion, passed this information on to the nurse who’s taken our handover.
- Finding a location – ah, the perennial problem of ambulance work: finding the patient. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve used Google on my Blackberry to find nursing homes. Google maps has helped us navigate there when TomTom has failed.
- Getting into a house – yeah, not your usual use of a mobile phone this, but I did once make use of the Internet to find the telephone number for a patient’s family to find out where the spare key was kept. 1am, standing outside the patient’s house, freezing cold and stomping around in the snow with no way of getting in, I was very glad I had my mobile with me.
I’m actually considering getting the BNF on my phone at the moment to help us with understanding drugs – the drugs a patient is taking is often helpful in giving us an idea of what the patient is suffering from when the patient can’t or won’t tell us.
I’ve even, on occasion, been known to use my phone to make phone calls.
So, how do you use your phone? How has it changed the way you work?
Buckman is hosting this month’s edition of The Handover and asked people to write about people who influenced their career.
I have to admit, I’m not short of those. The two Richards, both of whom are accomplished and professional Paramedics in their own rights, each with a very different style. Andrew, Sharon and a whole host of others in Mountain Rescue. The other Richard who introduced me to London’s flavour of EMS work. My grandmother, a Nursing Auxiliary during the war who dispensed her own flavour of rough justice and maldod in my childhood. Malcolm, who got me involved in Mountain Rescue in the first place.
But I was looking for that person. You know, the one that made me stop and think. The one that inspired me to start down this path. And I have to admit that almost everyone in that list helped me get where I am and they may well deserve their own Portrait, but they didn’t give me that first spark.
That accolade goes to someone who didn’t really feature in that list. My grandfather.
Born in 1918 he grew up in the Welsh valleys where coal mining was The Industry. Brighter than the average my grandfather went to nightschool to learn to be a Mining Surveyor and made a career of it. He took a few years out to work for the Royal Engineers in India during the war but came back and worked in the mines in south Wales for most of his career. When I knew him, he was silver-haired and retired, spending much of his time working hard in the garden that was once a coal tip but now bloomed after his hard work. Like a lot of people his age he was a heavy smoker and I distincly remember him suffering from his angina. The little red bottle sprayed under the tongue and the pause while he waited for his heart to catch up.
I have nothing but fond memories of my grandfather. My parents both worked office jobs so when I came home from school, I would spend a few hours with my grandparents just a few hundred yards down the road from our home before my parents picked me up. He gave me my frist car, he taught me to write. He once told me that I could do anything if I worked hard and whatever it was I wanted to do, that he would support me – words that still echo in me today.
It all went wrong one Saturday in May. I remember I called into the house to say hello before I headed out for the day. My grandfather was in bed with my grandmother fussing over him. He just didn’t feel very well, nothing specific, known in the ambulance service as “generally unwell”. He looked pale, enough so that I asked him if he was OK. I asked if they’d rung the doctor but my grandfather insisted he was fine. I was 17 and didn’t really appreciate how people lie, even to their loved ones. I took his word at face value and went out to see my friends figuring it was something minor like it always had been in the past.
It was probably mid afternoon when I had a phone call. My grandfather was ill, the doctor had been called, I should come home, post haste. Grumbling, not realising the severity of the problem, I drove down to my grandparents house where it rapidly became apparent how serious it was. Our local GPs, two brothers, were the sons of the husband-wife pair who’d run the local practice before them. One of them was a cardiac specialist and he’d immediately called 999 for an ambulance, recognising the problem with my grandfather for what it was. I was sent to the bottom of the road to direct the ambulance. I windmilled for my life when I saw it and raced up the road behind it as quick as I could. I have no memory of seeing my grandfather going into the ambulance and my next memory of that day is my grandmother, flustered. My grandmother was never flustered. This was serious.
My father drove us into the local hospital 15 minutes drive away. It was a quiet journey, each of us contemplating the worst. We arrived and headed into A&E where they directed us to the Coronary Care Unit. We walked in and were ushered in quickly to see my grandfather sat up in bed smiling at us, connected up to a hundred cables. We crowded around, holding his hand and chatting quietly. My fears abated, we laughed and joked and said that we’d see him tomorrow.
The next half hour is perfectly clear. I was the last to leave and as I walked out my father was waiting for me. The doctor crossed the room in the corner of my eye and clearly called my granfathers’ name, questioningly. We walked down the corridor and my father met a friend and said he’d meet us in the car. I walked my now-much-releived grandmother out to the car and my father joined us about 10 minutes later – and asked us to come back in. The nurse had asked him to get us. Emotions running wild, we went back to CCU and were ushered into what I now know is the relatives’ room. A nurse came in to say that the Doctor was on his way and my grandmother looked her in the eye.
“He’s gone, hasn’t he?”
She paused. “Yes, i’m afraid he has, love. Doctor will be in to talk to you in a minute.”
The next bit was a blur. I have no idea what the doctor said but I remember going to visit the body, the shell, the sleeping form that was once my grandfather. I remember my grandmother taking his signet ring from his finger and wrapping my hand around it. “It’s yours now.” she said, shakily.
My grandfather had held on until we came to say goodbye to him – at least that’s how I like to think of it. Losing him tore me apart, he was a huge part of my life and I drifted through my A-levels in a daze. To this day, I still miss him sorely.
The signs were all there. When I saw him he was pale enough that an alarm bell rang in my head, but was dismissed when he said he was OK. He was sweaty. He had a feeling of being “just not quite right” and couldn’t shake it all day. He had a history of unstable angina, and was a heavy smoker. If someone described that situation to me now, I’d call an ambulance and give him half an aspirin. I’d ask about chest pain. I’d igore his insistence that he was fine.
My grandfather wasn’t some medical genius, a world-leading surgeon or medical scientist. He was a retired mining surveyor. He didn’t show me any amazing medical procedures. What he made me do was promise to myself that I’d never miss that again. If only we’ve have received some basic lessons in recognising these things at school or anywhere. I didn’t see it. I kicked myself for months that I could have done something but didn’t.
Eventually I accepted the situation, but every decision I’ve made since that saw me doing anything medical stems from that one event. From the knowledge that I could have done more if only I knew. A promise to myself and to him that I will work hard. So that hopefully, one day, I’ll turn up in time to help someone else’s grandfather.
There’s a big push in the emergency services to get information out to the front line, to the people who really need it. PC Copperfield has emigrated to Canada where the police seem to have a better handle on process and communications to the front line. Access to all kinds of data is useful when you’re on the front line – like when a patient shows you what drugs they’re on but you don’t recognise them, you can look them up in the BNF. When a patient has a rare disease that you’ve not come across but you really need to know what it is, you can look it up in a whole variety of places, like Kal once did. And last week, I used it several times in a shift, twice to satisfy my own thirst for knowlege, a couple of times to find care homes who weren’t well signposted and once to find an important piece of information.
The two not-so-important things were to look up what a bruit was and the second to find out what Tramacet is (a strong painkiller). The second resulted in an interesting conversation with the A&E nurse after we’d booked our patient in.
The other use was a little more…immediate.
A job came through to us around midnight, asking us to go to the local A&E and pick up an elderly lady from a corridor and take her home as she’d been waiting for some time. These kind of jobs are lovely because they’re simple, there’s little or no medical problems to worry about (and while I’m in this for the medicine, it’s occasionally nice to know that your patient isn’t going to die on you. Probably.) and people are supremely grateful. So we tromp into A&E, find our patient and sit her in the ambulance to driver her home. She’s a lovely old lady with a cracking black eye and mild dementia – she’s lucid but isn’t too good at remembering things.
So we get to her address and park up. There’s some talking from the back as I fiddle with the radio for a second to let control know we’ve arrived. A head appears next to me as my attendant sticks her head through the partition. “We can’t find her key.”
We help her look through her pockets. We help her look through her bag. Twice. No key. I run down and check the door, yes it’s locked. Shit. Wait – that’s a keysafe, great. I run back – does she remember the number to her keysafe? No. Shit. Any relatives? No. Son or Daughter? No. Do the neighbours have a key? No. Does she leave one under the mat or a plantpot? No. Carers? Yes, but they’re private and she doesn’t remember the company name.
Right, contact control who have nothing on the incident record. However, she was taken in earlier in the shift so the controller goes to dig around to find the original incident. Right. We empty her bag out. Still no key. Control get back to us saying they’ve spoken to the original crew who mentioned a son. Wait, a son? So I jump in the back and skirted around the earlier questions with a more direct approach.
“What’s you’r son’s name, my love?”
“Chris.”
My colleage stares at me open-mouthed.
“Where does Chris live?”
“In LittleVillage.”
This is bad news – LittleVillage is about 90 minutes West of where we were at best. Still, let’s try for his address to see if I can get his phone number. She remembers the house number and can describe the street where he lives but doesn’t remember the road name. So I get my phone out. Luckily LittleVillage is about 2 miles from where I grew up and her description of the street is one I recognise, so I don’t bother with Google maps.
Onto the BT directory enquiries page. I look up the details. Hrm, nothing in that street. Check google maps – the house number is quite large, almost 200 and there aren’t that many long streets in the village. Try this one instead – aha!
I call the number. “Hi, this is the Ambulance service here…”
“Oh, thank God, you’re taking my mother home?” Right, sounds like we’ve got the right one then.
He knew the keysafe number. And knew where she normally kept her key. So we got her in, put the fire on, made a cup of tea and helped her warm up.
Would we have got her in without the internet? Probably – control could have looked up the number for us, but it could have taken longer. Did the internet help? Yes, without a doubt – I could use the information that I had to find the address quickly and confirm it easily with the patient. Is this the most important use of the internet that we will have? No, without a doubt. I’ve already had twitter increase my knowledge of chest pain in adolescents (thanks Kal!) and teach me about conditions I might come across. We’re humans, not encyclopedias – we will come across things that we don’t know or need reminding of.
I really do think that with the arrival of Airwaves in the Ambulance service we should see smarter devices being rolled out with access to medical databases for looking up medications and conditions or illnesses. I’d like to see medical records being accessible to the front line as well – though I understand the privacy concerns. We have to be careful not to overload the guys on the front line, but access to the information when they need it really can save lives. We need to make sure that we have sources that are definitive and trustworthy and not just wikipedia.
People said that the end of the last century and the start of the new millenium was the information age. Is this the age that we see information being distributed to every person wherever they are, whatever they’re doing?
A few months ago I walked into my first St John Ambulance evening in Cardiff. Last week I was a member of a 2-man St John crew on an ambulance helping out the Ambulance service on a 12-hour shift on New Year’s Eve. It’s been a very fast and steep learning curve to get here and I loved working the shift.
A number of cases stand out in my mind from a number of the shifts, some of which will make interesting blog posts, some of which will never make my blog for various reasons.
One in particlar sticks out. We’re called to attend a 999 call which has been downgraded to a Green call – an incident that requires a response without blue lights. We turn up and have a chat. The gentleman is in his 40s and has parasthesia from the waist down. He speaks very little English. We ascertain through pidgeon English and gestures that he’s urinating blood.
I’m not attending for this one, but something strikes me as odd. His feet are bandaged neatly – apparently he’s burned them and has been to hospital for his feet already. I look around the room and spot a box of tablets on the windowsill with a hospital pharmacy label. I point to them and he nods. Antibiotics. Paracetamol. There’s a letter with it and again he nods and I read.
His feet are injured from a scald and he spent a few days in hospital. Whilst he was there they noticed the complaint of haematuria and investigated, finding nothing and eventually referring him to a specialist in a nearby hospital. The notes go into more detail – his condition and pain seems unchanged from the time of admission. He’s also seeking asylum in this country but has had his application refused. He has multiple presentations to multiple services over the past 8 months.
On the other hand, he’s complaining of pain and does have some blood in his urine. His obs are fine and he seems comfortable unless we ask him about the pain, whereupon his face screws up. We have a quick chat amongst ourselves and we decide to try and see if we can get the out of hours GP to have a look, and control is informed. We explain to the chap who indicates that he’s happy with this – he doesn’t really want to go to A&E, it’ll be a several hour wait and he can’t afford the taxi journey home.
We hear a knock at the door and in walks a paramedic. We have a brief look between us before enquiring why he’s here. Control sent him. A handover is made and the paramedic asks the chap about his pain, then spends the next 10 minutes or so convincing him he needs to go to A&E, much to our confusion. We look confused but are happy to take him – obviously the paramedic is the senior clinician on scene here.
So we walk the chap out to the truck and drive him up to A&E. The charge nurse gave us a shitty look and we looked suitably apologetic as she tutted over the patient for a few minutes. She comes over to us. We explain what happened.
“Right, I see. Well, being here serves neither his best interests nor ours. I’m referring him to the out of hours GP.”
We left quietly.
“Dusk is falling and the lamp lighters are at work – it’s Christmas Eve for sure!”
Just finishing off the last few bits of shopping today and my thoughts are with those people who won’t be able to go home to enjoy Christmas with their families. An ambulance just went past on blues. There’s two policemen on duty over there. There’s firemen, doctors, nurses – all who’ll be missing Christmas with the family.
Here’s to you all, wherever you are. Merry Christmas everyone.
At around 1700 Monday night I had a text message – contingency plans were in place to assist the ambulance service, could I crew a vehicle?
So after work, I grabbed some food and ironed my uniform before de-snowing the car and heading into Llanishen. Once I got out of our village the roads were ok – probably because there was plenty of traffic to keep them clear. Our end of the street was awful, but then we only have about 10 houses there. The trip wasn’t helped by the fact that my car has developed a hole in the exhaust from all the salt. It’s in the garage being fixed today…
So we jumped on the vehicle and completed our inspection very quickly – it’s easier when you have two people doing it, and we had three on the vehicle last night. I decided that I’d had enough time driving and wanted more experience in the back, so arranged to be the attendant for the evening.
We logged on and immediately were asked to hold on for a second while control checked what we should be sent to first. They called back and asked us to back up an RRV for transporting a patient, but when we arrived on scene, the RRV reported that the patient had already made their own way to the hospital. Clearing from that incident, we were dispatched to back up another RRV, about half a mile down the road. There we picked up a woman in her 40’s with “nonspecific abdo pain”. Once I’d coughed my way through the cigarette smoke, we prepared the carry-chair and she stood from her armchair and sat herself down. Mike and I packed her and moved her out to the vehicle with some difficulty – a scenario not covered in training was using our equipment in snow and we found it sinking through the snow and ice.
Mike had already started to attend to her so I took the keys and prepared to drive when whe woman asked for “gas and air”. We looked surprised and asked her, on a scale of 1 to… “It’s 10.” she interrupted us, sitting comfortably and not showing any signs of pain. I blinked and sighed inwardly, leaving Mike to it. Apparently, morphine didn’t touch her pain (hence why she hadn’t asked the paramedic for any), but entonox worked wonders. It was a quick drive to the hospital and we passed her over to the care of the nurses in A&E. There followed a discussion between the three of us on the ethics of witholding pain medication if you believe that there was no clinical need for it.
The next job was for a young woman who really did need us. A transfer into hospital, the GP had diagnosed “?DVT R leg”. Her medical history was long and she was currently just 2 months out of her most recent encounter with chemotherapy. From the way she held herself I could tell she was guarding herself against pain and I asked if we could help, but she politely declined analgesia in stark contrast to our previous patient.
Our last patient was a hospital transfer for another “?DVT” patient. 97 year old lady, she was a real card. I had a great time chatting to her on the long trip to hospital. She reminded me a lot of my own grandmother (who’s 92) except that she got a little repetitive at times. She confided to me that she didn’t mind what we did to her so long as we told her first. She was a little deaf and I found myself being her closest friend as I was the one who got confirmation that she’d heard me before we did anything. We got to the hospital and found that there was no bed for her – a bit shocking as this was a transfer from another hospital. We sat in the corridor for a while, chatting with her until we were given a trolley for her. Her condition needed treatment, but it wasn’t a surgical emergency (according to the Surgeon who reviewed her later as well as the nurses) so there was some confusion as to why she had been transferred at that time of night. The constant bouncing around annoyed me, though not near as much as the paramedic who bumped our stretcher out of the way just to get past us, casuing our patient to call out in pain. We may only be “Jonnies”, we may only be carrying an old lady while you’re dealing with a patient going into resus – that’s no reason to hit our trolley out of the way instead of walking around.
We said our goodbyes and headed off for a break – things seemed to be calming down. We’d not long finished our break when we got our last job of the night – back to the hospital to pick the same old lady up. We looked at each other and shook our heads – this was the second time in two days she’d been passed back and forth from one hospital to another – completely unacceptable. We picked her up again, much to her delight, though this time I drove and passed the responsibility of looking after her to a colleague – I was tired and felt a bit drained from looking after her – she really did remind me a lot of my grandmother. My colleagues said that they’d transferred her less than a week ago as well.
We dropped her off and got her settled before cleaning our kit and checking in with control. They thanked us and sent us home, which was nice since the temperature was dropping fast.
This was the busiest shift I’ve had so far. I really enjoyed it, though it left me feeling drained both physically and emotionally. Looking forward to more shifts now.
Tags: Ambulance, Christmas, dvt, hds, hospital, nan, St John
Well, that was a bit quieter than was expected…by ourselves as well as pretty much the entire city.
South Wales police reported that it was quieter last Friday than a normal Friday night. The ambulance crews in the Millenium Staduim drank lots of coffee and dealt with the few incidents we were called to – we only had 3 jobs on our vehicle all night.
I got called last night while in Cardiff to work an ambulance shift for Mid Glam. The highlight of the shift until midnight was the free hot mince pies with cream we were so kindly served by the staff in the canteen at the hospital. Nomnom. We managed to finish them off before we were called onto the one job of the night.
This is of course, a Good Thing. People were sensible and remained uninjured. Hooray.
Let’s see what the rest of my shifts bring this Christmas.
Today is Black Friday.
Most people won’t know and won’t care what that means, but if you work in or volunteer with the emergency services and you’re on duty tonight – you’re probably either sleeping in preparation or getting your stuff ready.
Black Friday is traditionally the last Friday before Christmas. It’s the day that large numbers of people organise to have a drink together before Christmas…and as a result, Cardiff alone will see 300,000 revellers partying tonight. It’s an incredibly busy night for the emergency services, busier even than New Year’s Eve.
So, what am I doing tonight? After working my day job, I’m on duty (as a volunteer) with St John tonight who have been asked to provide the Welsh Ambulance Service with assistance in Cardiff. We have around 10 extra ambulances on duty; we’re helping to staff the triage centers both in St Mary Street and in the Millenium Stadium. I suspect we’ll see everything from broken nails to alcohol poisoning and assaults, as well as the normal numbers of cardiac arrests and the usual calls because life goes on. I suspect we’ll get more RTC’s tonight because it’s cold and icy and it’s also going to be busy.
And Oh My God but it’ll be cold tonight. The MetOffice is reporting a low of -3 Celsius tonight, down from the dizzy heights of +2 Celsius, with wind speeds dying down from 23mph to 5mph (giving “wind chill” temperatures of around -6 Celsius). That means freezing roads and crashing cars. It means freezing pavements and falling drunk people. It means cold air and hypothermia in partygoers wearing very little. That “beer jacket” that keeps you warm when you’re drunk? It doesn’t – it just stops you from feeling the cold. It could kill you on a night like this.
So tonight we’ll be busy. Tonight we’ll be picking up, helping, trying not to get assaulted and trying to keep warm. I’ll be tweeting and possibly updating the blog where I can, you can follow me on twitter if you’d like: www.twitter.com/thinknuts
Stay safe!
Back in October of last year, I applied to join South Wales Police as a special constable. Thigns kinda came to a grinding halt over Christmas when the process stopped. It dragged on for a few months and the rumour I had from friends in the force was that all recruitment was on a hold for the time being.
I sat down and re-assesed my options, talking to Sean. I felt as though I was still missing something and Sean was still happy with me doing somethign in addition to Mountain Rescue. I’ve always enjoyed the medical side of Mountain Rescue and I really missed dealing with patients as I used to in the First Responders. So, what could I do?
Enter St John Ambulance. I called national headquarters, based in Cardiff and was referred to Father Andrew, the Divisional Officer In Charge (DOIC) of Cardiff Central. After a long conversation with him, it sounded like I’d hit on the perfect unit – they perform mainly front-line ambulance duties and don’t have a cadet contingent which mean the unit concentrates on training and duties for their adult members.
The first night set the tone really – they’re mostly insane, much like Mountain Rescue. I passed them all the information I could about the training I had complete with Mountain Rescue. Things were looking great…and then a letter came through the door.
South Wales Police had started up its recruitment again. This caused a bit of a dilemma – leave St John and concentrate on the Police? Stop the recruitment process with the police? What to do?
I carried on with both (well, all three including Mountain Rescue) for a while, but this really wasn’t sustainable. Coupled with the fact that I had changed jobs and was considerably busier than I used to be, something had to change. So, after a long conversation with Sean, I decided to withdraw my application to South Wales Police for now. It’s something I’d still like to do, but I’m limited in how much time I have in life – I do like to sleep occasionally!
Last weekend, I passed the 7th course I’d taken in 5 weeks. It’s been a hectic month, but passing my PTA course now means that I can go out with St John Ambulance to do what’s called HDS duties (High Dependency Service) – these are thigns like Doctor’s urgents (when a patient needs to go to hospital urgently but isn’t life-threatening enough to call 999) and hospital transfers. I’m also one of our division’s two drivers currently – so looks like I’m going to be kept busy driving a lot.
On Thursday my uniform arrived – that’s right, look out for me wandering the streets of Cardiff in a natty green uniform. In fact, my first duty is this Saturday, when I’m joining two experienced members for my first HDS duty.
So, er, yeah, that’s where I am, that’s why I haven’t been blogging much of late. Work is taking me to London again this week which means I won’t (again) attend Mountain Rescue on Thursday. Look out for updates on the weekend from the HDS duty, as well as a whole bunch of rants and other stuff I’ve got queued up ready to post.
Tally ho!
Tags: Ambulance, hds, Mountain Rescue, police, sean, St John
So I forgot I hadn’t posted this. Oops.
We left Todi and had a mammoth drive through Italy, Switzerland and France. It was slated to be 10 hours of driving, but things didn’t go to plan.
Leaving Todi, we hit Italian rush hour which was a bit interesting and I had to concentrate hard to avoid the other cars. It felt like the worst of London driving. We made it to Florence quite quickly though where we’d planned a quick stop to post some postcards that we’d not managed to get stamps for. Well, that was the plan. Our detour into Florence took an hour, going through some beautiful sights and via the main sorting office (that doesn’t sell stamps). Eventually, I dropped Sean off next to the main train station and kept running circles around the block until he came back. Turns out the train station sells stamps…
The weather closed in on us at this point, with heavy rain following us up all the way to Milan. Far from being an interesting and fun drive, this was a hard slog. It wasn’t until we started up into the mountains that the rain eased off a little, but we rapidly hit the clouds and so our progress was slowed down once more. We were aiming for the Gottard tunnel and after weaving my way around queues of lorries, we finally got there.
The tunnel is, I’m sure, a feat of engineering. I certainly appreciated it for that. The drive, though, is boring. It’s a tunnel. Think of the Limehouse link, only 15 miles long and you’re pretty much there. There is, however, a radio station broadcasting inside the tunnel with emergency information, which I thought was quite nifty, though it’s not signposted well enough for someone driving along the motorway.
We came out of the Gottard tunnel and started the journey towards France. It felt like we were past the crux now…which was the wrong feeling, since about 10 minutes north of the tunnel, we hit a traffic jam. There was traffic as far as the eye could see and it was all stationary. After sitting there for a few minutes I turned the engine off, as did everyone else. Within minutes, the road was packed solid in both directions and we settled down for a long wait, with no idea what was going on. Luckily, we’d packed some food for the journey, so we had somethign to eat. It was quite surreal – high in the Swiss mountains, in a picturesque valley with chalets all around us….and cows. Now, I though the Swiss cow bell was a cute little tourist trinket. Turns out, they actually use them. So we’re sat there with a herd of cows next to us, all of which wear bells. Who knew – after a while, that noise gets intensely irritating.
Eventually, after about two hours of delay we got going again – the road narrowed ahead due to roadworks and just at the entrance were some fresh skidmarks and broken glass by the side of the road – which answered the question of what was going on.
By this point the journey wasn’t so much fun as “let’s just get there”. We were both ready to go home and it was only necessity that made us stop in some services just inside Switzerland near the French border. We were starving and needed something, even if it was service-station sandwiches. What we got was just incredible.
We walked in and looked around, getting our bearings. To our right was the restaurant which, at ten o’clock local time, I was expecting to be closed – but it wasn’t. We shrugged and wandered over, before being assaulted by an incredible array of sights and aromas. They had a number of areas, each selling a different kind of freshly cooked food. We looked on in amazement and chose Chicken Cordon Bleu which they cooked in front of us. It wasn’t a five star restaurant, but it was certainly something that Little Chef and Moto could learn from. It sure as hell was not Burger King or McDonalds.
We set off again and got to the hotel just around midnight, having had to call them en route to find out why they weren’t where TomTom said they should be – turns out this is a common problem and her first question was “Do you have satellite navigation?”. She gave us directions from there to a village with the same name as the street we were on about 2 miles away. Reception had closed down for the night when we arrived – this was a small local hotel and our keys were waiting for us on a piece of paper with my name badly mis-spelt.
Thursday morning, a quick breakfast after not enough sleep and we set off again, determined to have a better day. The weather agreed and after some patchy showers, opened up into a beautiful if slightly windy day. We make great progress through the French motorways and hit Calais almost 2 hours earlier than our ferry. A quick stop in a supermarket to take advantage of the cheap diesel and we drove down to the terminal. Without blinking we got put on the next possible ferry leaving in about 30 minutes and we mooched around for a bit admiring the drugs dogs at work. We even managed to get BBC Kent on the radio. We both smiled – I think we were both glad to be going home at this point.
We had a lovely dinner on the ferry – we stood outside Langan’s Brasserie for a bit before threw caution to the wind and decided to end the holiday in style with steaks on the way home. Very nice indeed, as was the creme brulee and, by this time, it was nice to have English accents around us.
It was getting dark by the time we got to Dover and with a reminder from TomTom to drive on the left again, we were back on British soil. Not quite home yet though – we drove to Slough where I met up with some of my work colleagues for a conference the following day. I was far mroe tired than I expected and on Friday, by lunchtime, I was falling asleep in the comfort of the conference and decided that I wasn’t doing any good here. I took off, met up with Sean in Leicester Square for some lunch and we drove home.
We both had an absolutely awesome time and certainly clocked up some miles. I’d like to do something similar again, though in a more comfortable car and with more time to spend in each place. Brussels was lovely and we want to go back there. We never really saw Zurich, and Strasbourg was a lovely surprise. I’m not sure I’d want to drive in Italy again – the other drivers make it very stressful. We’re already putting ideas together as to our next one, suggestions so far include the UK, north or eastern Europe and the USA/Canada.