COUNTER-INTUITIVE ROUTING

One of the joys of being a tourist guide is avoiding the daily commute. You are either starting too early, if it is the first day of a long tour (and you will go by taxi anyway) or you are going to different hotels each day. You also usually miss the long slow crawl of cars driving into the city, which continues even with the congestion charge, as you are going out of town as toehrs come in (and vice versa at the end of the day).

This does not always work, however. I had a Bath/Stopnehenge day trip from a hotel in Canary Wharf yesterday and was dreading joining the crawl through the East end and City that you have for a London tunnel and which knocks a big hole into a day with a tight timetable. So I tried a bit of counter-intuitive routing and, with the driver's agreement, we drove under the Thames through the Blackwall Tunnel towards Canterbury, actually going into Kent (virtually the opposite direction fromthe way we wanted to go). We reached the M25 London ring road in about half an hour and joined that around South London through Surrey and Sussex until we reached the M3 which we took towards Stonehenge.

We made it in an hour and twenty minutes so the group had a good hour and a bit there and two hours in Bath ebfore we left at three, comfortably making it back for the six o'clock dinner that they had book in London on return. They had already seen London and did not want to crawl into the City again, so they had a better day than if we had headed in the obvious direction.

I was pleased with that - and the tip I had at the end of the day. Canadian Catholics they were - obviously the most generous people...