Day 8 - 3rd January

Today we leave London and pick up our rental car at Heathrow and start our journey north.  The plan is to get to Cambridge to visit Duxford mid-afternoon then stay the night and have another bite of Duxford the next day, then drive to Yorkshire.

We chose a pickup at Heathrow as it’s outside the city limits and so would make getting onto the motorway system easier.

So, we duly check out of our room (bye for now London) and after much debate about the best options to get to Heathrow (train, uber or taxi), we decide on train, but not the Heathrow Express as this is pretty pricey (£24) but instead use the regular tube. Using it after 9:30 also means a cheaper fare! The trip is to go from London Bridge to Green Park on the Jubilee line then out to Heathrow on the Piccadilly line. So we then schlep our luggage from the Hotel to London Bridge Station (unwieldy but not yet at critical mass) while negotiating a path between the incoming tourists and regular commuters (London sidewalks are very narrow) then negotiate our way through the tube. Fortunately London Bridge has a lift to use but there are still stairs to descend to our line. However as I struggled down with my case, a kindly stranger picked up one end and helped me down.

We jammed ourselves on a tube carriage and then switched at Green Park. The ride takes about an hour though so we eventually got to Heathrow late morning. Once there at Terminal 2, it was chaos as we had to find where the rental shuttle van picked up from as well as fight our way past dozens of incoming passengers all queuing to use the lifts to get to the same place. Its not very well signposted but after asking an attendant for help we were able to flag down our Avis shuttle and off we went.

The journey from Terminal 2 to the Avis depot took about 20 minutes and the whole area is a rabbit warren of roads, car parking, and terminal areas and would be a nightmare to try & walk.

Arriving at Avis we picked up our car – we had hoped for a Fiat Bambina but they instead gave us a Hyundai i30 which had marginally more boot space which will come in handy. So we duly loaded up, I sat in the driver’s seat, turned the key and nothing. Hmm, checked there was no starter button, tried again, nothing. After 5 minutes of various combinations I asked the attendant who advised that both brake AND clutch needed to be depressed at the same time – OK so that’s a new one.

We have a new GPS that replaced our old one that no longer worked reliably and had that fired up and ready to go, but just out of the terminal as we were about to head into the spaghetti junctions of roads and on / off ramps, the GPS turned off, so desperately fired up google maps to provide some level of direction, and fortunately we headed off in the right direction.

The drive to Cambridge was uneventful. The roading system in England is generally very good, and the ‘A’ roads (eg A1) or M roads (eg M11) are usually two to four lanes so allow a good flow of traffic. There are dozen’s of trucks on the roads, and every so often one will try to pass the other. The relative speed is slow so it’s several minutes before one can pass the other and in the meantime all the other vehicular traffic is moving to the outer lanes to get past both of them.

The route we took to Cambridge was a circuitous one and I’d expected to go up the M11 directly and then turn off but we went via Royston instead , but the time difference was negligible and we arrived in Cambridge late afternoon.

We went straight to Duxford where Deb dropped me off and she then went into Cambridge to our Hotel and would pick me up at 5pm when the site closed.

Duxford is a huge site and there are 6 main hangars as well as an ‘American Airpower’ hanger. The site is run by the Imperial War Museum but also hosts several aircraft restoration companies who store their airworthy vintage aircraft onsite.

The first hangar is devoted to British aircraft and contains Spitfire, Lancaster, Mosquito, Sunderland as well as some very exotic aircraft like the Concorde 002 test aircraft and the DeHavilland Comet.

Hangar 2 is where a lot of the operational restored aircraft live, and most are undergoing winter maintenance (there are not a lot of air shows over the winter so is an ideal time) , so the hangar is filled with aircraft with panels and cowlings off, exposing the inner workings. The good thing is that you can get quite close to a lot of them and the staff are very friendly to chat with.

Inside hangar 1

Inside hangar 1

The other hangars contain static restored aircraft and one is a restoration hanger where you can see up close what is needed to restore these machines. When I walked in, a lone chap was working on a part of a massive Victor bomber that had been stripped to bare metal and dismantled almost entirely.

Victor Bomber under restoration

B-17 undergoing maintenance

I happily wandered around until it was time for pickup, but by the end of the day I was very cold as once again the air temp plummets when the sun goes down and there is an awful lot of open ground to cover between hangars and warmth! 

A fairly quiet night in after that, and we had dinner in the hotel restaurant as other eateries were too far away (and it was too cold to walk anywhere!)