Are you in safe hands if you book with me? Really?

I have been doing this job for years now and it really is a job I love doing. I book fabulous cruises for people to all four corners of the earth. I book their flights, transfers, hotels, car hire, and those really exciting excursions that enable you to make the most of each destination. There really isn’t any part of your trip that I can’t help you with – I can even help you to arrange your wedding or renewal of your wedding vows on board a luxury cruise ship.

I can honestly say that it is very rare that anything goes wrong if you let me make your arrangements for you, give or take the odd volcano erupting or Air Traffic Control strike here or there. Yes, I can say with complete confidence that you really are in safe hands if you book with me – however, ask me to get you from one side of Birmingham to the other, well that’s a completely different matter altogether!

Today we celebrated the Christening of the adorable little Alfie who is the son of my colleagues David and Emma Broad. They live in Erdington which is just north of Birmingham City Centre and I live in a village called Alvechurch which is about 10 miles south of Birmingham. The estimated journey time according to the Sat Nav was 35 minutes so in the grand scheme of travel this was what you might call small fry. My colleague Vicki, along with her two sons, and I set off armed with said Sat Nav and AA Routeplanner printed off on paper too so what could possibly go wrong?  What indeed?

It all started off so well, the sun was shining as we headed onto the M42 then filtered onto the M5 North which we were to travel along until it merged with the M6 then at Junction 6 of the latter we needed to bear left onto the M6 signposted London and the South from where we would end up on the A38 not far from our destination. Well somewhere around Junction 6 something went not quite right – personally I think the woman on the Sat Nav didn’t know what she was on about and she totally disagreed with AA Routeplanner. Anyway, we somehow ended up on the M6 North and eventually got off at Junction 9. Now this wouldn’t have been a problem normally, we could just have got back on the motorway and got back to where we were and come off at Junction 6 but the motorway slip road was closed for maintenance work meaning we had to take a different route without any directions! We were on our own! The woman on the Sat Nav kept directing us back towards the motorway obviously totally unaware of the slip road closure – give me strength! Suffice it to say we turned her off. We went this way and that way, we passed some landmarks twice, seemed to go round and round. The boys were by now asking how much further is it?, and then obviously due to the prolonged journey the youngest one decided he was going to be sick so we pulled over onto the side of the road and got out of the car at which point he decided that he wasn’t going to be sick after all!

I am not entirely sure how we managed it but using our most excellent ‘women’s sense of direction’ we finally arrived at our destination (I will gloss over the going up a one way street in the wrong direction at this point) about 3/4 hour late.

We had a wonderful afternoon celebrating Alfie’s special day, great company, delicious food and lovely sunshine so the trauma of the journey was soon forgotten. You will be pleased to hear that we made the return journey in 35 minutes on the nose, without the assistance of herself on the Sat Nav!

Despite my failings getting across the city I am still confident that I can get you around the world, or to any part of it you may wish to visit, safely and efficiently so please feel free to call me on 0330 303 8184 or email me at [email protected] and I will be more than happy to help you. For local travel on motorways surrounding Birmingham you are probably better asking someone else!