Reporting from a curry shop somewhere in West Yorkshire. Probably, Sheffield, Wellerton, or Halifax. It is getting towards sunset. You might think we are worried. "Have they booked a room for the dark English night?", you must be thinking with worry.

We don't have to.

We have our car.

Our mighty right-hand-drive steed.

A red rocket wonder machine blazing across the English countryside.

It is called the Marabby.

We set out from East London without a map, simply heading northwardish where we are pretty sure Scotland is.

"That a six or seven hour drive" said the concerned owners of D&K Mobile, a couple who provides a fair number of the Mongol Rally chariots and some sound advice.

We were polite and did our best to take their advice about the drive. But inwardly, our Americanism got the best of us. We laughed inwardly at the nominal distance. Six hours you say? Hah, that is little more than our daily commute to work we thought.

Team Gobi or Go Home was high on owning a car and the freedom it entails.

A couple hours later we returned to Earth or at least England and pulled over to purchase a map. Having been relying on the sun for navigation rather than road signs we found it quite hard to find our location on the map. It was made even harder by the fact that we hadn't made much progress and were looking at the wrong part of the map.

Thus we decided that we would go camping at a site in the Yorkshire Dales at a place about an hour away.

Or so Hans tells me.

...

Hans has fooled me again. I had really thought he was properly navigating us. Then I saw the same church twice.

If we had stuck to the highway we would be in Scotland by now. As it is we are pulling into a campground a fair bit short of our intended goal in the Yorkshire Dales three hours after Hans claimed we were 30 minutes to an hour from our destination.

On our team we don't like to cast blame but it really is Hans' fault.

I pulled over and took the map from Hans. "Show me the route we have come from." He pointed to a tortuous route that wove from left to right across the map, making sure to hit every town, dale, and shire. It was a path a squiggly lizard takes while running from a bird.

That is when it hit me. Every time we came to a round-about I would ask Hans which exit to take.

After the first or second circumnavigation I would have to decide for him and say, “We are now heading to Parsondale”, in which he said, "Oh wait, we should have gone to Brumsley, or Grobbyshire, or Riverwolde."

I would then start looking for a place to turn around when he would state, “No, no wait. Parsondale is fine."

What he should have said was, "No, no wait. I can devise us a much longer path to our destination that includes Parsondale."

Thus we had dodged from one wrong village to the next with with me blaming twisty British roads for our troubles rather than where it belonged with my navigator.

I relieved Hans of the map and I don't want to brag but I'm going to anyways. With the map in my lap I drove to the next three towns on my route in order.

And that my friends is how we came to be safe and sound at a lovely, tidy, English campground in Clitheroe, England.

Hans to his credit gave a sage piece of advice.

"Let's not call this town Clit-Hero in front of a local. They probably say it differently"