vroom

We did rather a lot of driving at the weekend - Hazel had a wedding album to deliver near Southampton on Saturday morning, we were due up at my parents' place on Saturday afternoon, and we were going to a christening near Runcorn on Sunday morning. That's more than enough mileage in itself, but we had an unexpected detour to make. We were staying near Marlborough on Friday night, so we drove down in the evening, only to discover that we'd left the wedding album in Newport. I say "we", but actually it was my fault. So we had to make an extra round trip from Marlborough to Newport and back to pick it up. All of which delayed my first pint of Brakspear's at the very nice Barleycorn Inn in Collingbourne Kingston by about three hours, which was a bit irritating. But, like I say, my fault.

Factor all that into the planned mileage for the weekend and you end up with this, all within about 48 hours:

Friday:

• Newport to Bristol: 25 miles
• Bristol to Marlborough: 55 miles
• Marlborough to Newport: 75 miles
• Newport to Marlborough: 75 miles

Saturday:

• Marlborough to Romsey: 25 miles
• Romsey to Abergavenny: 155 miles

Sunday:

• Abergavenny to Runcorn: 150 miles
• Runcorn to Newport: 170 miles

Total: 730 miles

All of which set me to wondering: if, instead of looping round in a series of contorted figures of 8 only to end up back where we'd started, we'd just kept going in a straight line, where would we have ended up? Fortunately there are various internet resources that will tell you this sort of thing. It turns out we could have got as far as:

• Dresden
• Genoa
• Gothenburg
• Marseille
• Barcelona

- or we could have done round trips via

• Rotterdam, Brussels, London
• Dublin, Edinburgh, Leeds

All as the crow flies, of course, and I am aware that you can't drive a car through the ocean, unless of course you're James Bond.