trip log: new town

Photo from here.

After a few hours of sleep, we woke up and chatted with my cousin Yvonne and briefly with her daughter Maria. The last time I saw her she was an 18 month old baby so it was really exciting and strange to see her as a teenager. We decided to try walking to the train station, something that everyone from my Dad to my cousins warned me was a bad idea because it was too far, but we wanted to try it anyway.

Harlow New Town is a city built in the 1950s and is unique in England in that it hasn’t been around for hundreds of years like all the others. This means that it is designed quite differently and instead of a main street lined with pubs, chemists and the like, it has a central square with all the shopping centres and the bus station. We were in the south east corner of the town and the town centre and train station were on the north end and a fair bit further west, so it was certainly not a short walk. This was complicated by the way the city was designed – it seems to be divided up into different sections and between them, there are large fields! So we walked out of Yvonne’s neighbourhood and in no time we were walking along a sidewalk that had a large green field on one side and a major road on the other. There were several places where there were underpasses for the path to go under the traffic circles and there were lots of trees along the paths. Eventually we made it to the town centre and looked around a bit. I think the massive ASDA grocery store was new and we went in there to look around. It was really cold inside and I was freezing so I kept pestering Dan to hurry up and of course he wanted to look at everything. After that we made an attempt at walking to the train station from the town centre, and this was very problematic due to the aforementioned field and tree situation and ended up taking over 20 minutes. So overall, walking from her house to the train station took an hour, which we finally admitted was too long, even for us. That meant that next week when we were planning to visit London, we had to submit ourselves to the mercy of the Harlow Transit System, about which we had only heard bad things…

We walked back to Yvonne’s and she had made a delicious spaghetti dinner for us. We watched a few episodes of Absolutely Fabulous but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Dan enjoyed it a lot, as he had seen a few episodes in Canada and these were ones he hadn’t seen. Maria, her friend and Dan went to the nearby chippy to get some chips and Dan came back with some curry sauce that I liked but he wasn’t too sure about.