lost in orpington

yesterday i had my last big travel adventure in england- i headed out at 6.45 AM ~~~south to the far side of london.

red dot-orpington

 i had a vague idea where i was going since i did a similar trip on tuesday. this time though i hit the morning rush hour in london and spent a good 20 minutes packed like a sardine in a tube carraige wondering on a scale of 1-10 how distressing this was for the average english person…all that body contact-being so close to other humans, strangers in fact- that you can see every blemish and hair on the back of their heads…but they do seem to survive, mostly in a very detached, denial sort of way.

so this time i was not heading to a hospital, i had agreed to go directly to the medical records office to save them the trouble of transporting the case notes. and yes, somewhere in kent in an industrial complex is the warehouse that holds thousands of patients medical records-of which they had pulled 10-12 and put them in a room for me.

i had an address and a post code-the holy grail of location finding in england and looked at a map but couldn’t quite figure out if orpington or st mary cray train station was closer. i ended up going with orpington because i assumed that being a bigger station there would be a taxi-i was right and wrong. there was a taxi but it was further away than st mary cray.

so on leaving the warehouse, i was assured i could walk to st mary cray train station with the basic directions…go to the top of the road, turn right…when you get to the mini roundabout go to the left and follow it round…yeah right!

now it’s all very englishy sounding names to go with the curvy streets click here to see a map

so it didn’t take long for me to get lost…luckily it was a pleasant, spring day, a nice neighborhood and i had plenty of time. i had to put out an SOS call and approach one of the few locals out and about but did eventually find the station

it was so boring, non-descript and un-station-like that i can’t imagine how i missed it…

all day-even on the way home i kept wondering what a cray was~~becasue st mary had one, st paul had one~~ even the foot had one…

it’s a river!!

so that’s pretty much the end of my UK tour-i have to go to london to the torture chamber  office on tuesday and possibly coventry but that is old territory. hopefully when i come back-and i WILL be back it will be more of a holiday and i can go to scotland and ireland and seaside resorts and relax like a tourist!!