We took the Tube to Paddington station and I found the ticket office. There was a bit of a queue for the tickets but I managed to pick them up ok. I made my way out to the platform where Lou was flapping her arms a bit. I didn’t realise how late it was and we had four minutes to get on the train! There was a nice man who had loaded all our gear on to a trolley and we were all set for a quick dash to the train. We said a rather quick goodbye to Jackie and bolted to our carriage. We had to get on the train a couple of carriages early and so we carted our gear through the train to our seats as the train left the station.
The train trip was quick considering the distance we were traveling and the carriage we were in was fairly empty. We kept Will amused with Baby Einstein and some yummy food. Lou got worried at one point when we pulled up to Gloucester station and then started going backwards. I joked that we were heading back to London but she almost took me seriously.
We pulled in to the Cheltenham Spa station where we were greeted with a bit of rain and a happy looking Sally ready to pick us up. She looked surprised when we confessed that we didn’t know much about the flooding that had been hitting the area. We had seen newspaper headlines but we had thought that they were being sensationalist, however it turned out that these floods are the worst England has had on record. Worcester had been quite badly hit, Tewkesbury was isolated, and several rivers through Cheltenham and Gloucester were about to break. Sally works in the hospital in Cheltenham and it was being closed for three days!
We stopped at Tesco’s to pick up some supplies and there were signs outside the front doors warning people that supplies of water were being limited to 10 litres per transaction. Almost all of the bread and milk was gone and the water was being taken off the shelves as quickly as it was being stocked. We cheated the system a little and each took a load of water through the tills in preparation for a potential disaster as the water and electricity had been turned off to over 10,000 homes.
The flooding could be seen very clearly from the car. What looked like lovely lakes on either side of the M5 had been fields a couple of weeks ago. We could see water at the front doors of people’s homes, but apparently some places had water to a depth of five feet or more. The traffic on the M5 had slowed right down due to rubbernecking . We left the M5 and arrived at Naunton village which was unaffected by the floods despite its proximity to the affected areas.
We were greeted at the front door by Mark and Ben (who had grown so much since we had last seen him) and we settled ourselves in. Mark prepared a Chicken Balti which we all enjoyed. The boys went to bed and we stayed up and chatted a bit before going to bed ourselves.
