Heading for Birmingham and the PodCamp

We drove to Birmingham today, after having spent most of the morning cleaning up the house we’ve been staying in for a month. Celia doesn’t do a cleaning-up job by halves, so the place is probably better off than it’s been in months! (Nah, my niece is a pretty thorough cleaner too…)
The trip to Birmingham was supposed to take two and a half hours, and would have done if we hadn’t got slowed down in a couple of place. All in all it was a pretty straightforward trip, even if our Sat Nav did seem to be taking us an awful long way south before she sent us west. But we had a couple of mishaps with reading what she said, and had one detour while on the M1, and then another couple when we got to Birmingham city itself. We didn’t either of us see much of the city because we were so focused on Malvina that we had little time to notice anything else.
Anyway, we’re ensconced in a hotel out in the suburb of Edgbaston, which seems to be on one edge of the city (there’s a Welcome to Birmingham sign just along the road). Edgbaston has seen better days, I think, and a major rebuilding program must be due to go on. More than a dozen grand old three-storey houses on the other side of the main road are due for demolition, and the hotel we’re in has seen better days by far. It’s a bit of a rabbit warren. After we’d parked the car round the side of the building, we went in the front and were then taken by the proprietor along two or three corridors and through the dining room (one table and four chairs, tv, fridge, two microwaves), through another corridor and found that our room was right beside where we’d parked the car.
Later on we went out and found a Chinese (sorry, Cantonese) restaurant, and ordered takeaways. While we were waiting we were asked to sit in an area lower than the main restaurant. It smelt dank and musty, and there was no carpet on the floor. Turned out that with all the rain this summer, the place has been flooded out, and they’ve had a real job drying it.
I’m in Birmingham to go to the Pod Camp - not sure what it’ll be like, and whether I’ll enjoy it at all (I’ve lost some of my initial enthusiasm for the idea), and I’ll probably be the oldest there. Time will tell. Celia is going to check Birmingham out on her own tomorrow, which will probably mean we’ll go home with a good deal more than we came with. As it was we loaded up the car when we left the place we’d been staying in for a month.