A day trip to Cheshire Oaks

This year boxing day has seen me & my family travel what must be the furthest day trip we ever did since coming back to UK, from loughborough to chester in cheshire. The trip to cheshire was actually a family retreat and to celebrate my 20th wedding anniversary, in a way, in which my wife had planned to go to cheshire oaks for boxing day sale for quite sometime. The exact place is known as Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet. My dearest wife had prepared nasi lemak ikan bilis in the morning with telur rebus; If we were back home in Malaysia, I would love to have kerang but here, nowhere to be found and my youngest daughter had made Gimbap, a korean snack of seaweed-rice, something like California roll.

It took me around 2 hours to drive & reach there. The journey of 200 miles, according to google map. I enjoyed the driving part very much and the journey there really is spectacular. Our route was, among others, driving along the M42 motorway from Leicestershire down to Tamworth, Staffordshire, and then along the M6 motorway driving up north past Warwickshire, Staffordshire & Cheshire. I enjoyed the view & scenery through out the journey. There’s a Toll Plaza on M6 near Birmingham where I paid 4 quid en route and 3 quid on the way home. M6 is actually Britain’s first toll motorway (the longest too), recently tolled only in 2003 after much refurbishment.

Nowadays, travelling in UK, you won’t get lost when driving and this includes Europe too. As long as you have satellite navigation system (SatNav) in your car with UK & Europe maps installed, you will always get to your destination. In the past, when i was in Salford & Cardiff back in 1994 & 1985 respectively, I had to rely on those maps, one map for motorway and the other is the city map of the destination. So, if you drive into many cities, you need to have a map for each. Another problem with this was, traveling is time-consuming when missing a turn or reading the map wrongly & you need somebody on your side to hold the map & guide. With SatNav, you just need to key-in the post-code of your home and destination, the system will calculate and find route for you based on either shortest path or fastest route (usually involve motorways in a long distance journey). If you miss a turn especially at roundabouts, it will recalculate for you and display a slightly different route. This is done on-the-fly while you are driving. Needless to say, driving becomes enjoyable.

When we reached Chester Oaks at around 10 am, the place was already crowded with people shopping for low prices goods. We bought clothes and shoes, the usual items and I got myself two books at Borders for my work. Calendars & diaries were all half price. There was one large nike factory store where shoes were all half price. There were many Malaysians as well doing their boxing day shopping and they must had come from all over UK .We had our lunch & prayers at the service centre nearby and then spent an hour or two again before heading home. By relating this in my blog, I hope that one day in the future, I would be able to look back, recall and reminiscence the good old days travelling together as family.