The family and I are just back from a family wedding, congratulations to my cousin Joseph and to Carly.

My mum’s side of the family are originally from Staffordshire, and with families growing up and moving around, I now have relatives in Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire.

We spent the weekend staying at a hotel in Newcastle Under Lyme, and being as I needed the car to get around on the weekend, drove there on Friday. The run down the M6 was fine, and I ran a one-stop strategy, stopping at the Westmorland services on the way down, with a very brief stop to buy new maps when we got to Newcastle.

The wedding itself was in the Leicester area, in a place called Blaby. Call me untravelled, but I find it fascinating to go places that I have never heard of that have councils and everything! The drive there was also pretty straightforward, passing such esteemed landmarks as Castle Donington and East Midlands Airport. And the wedding was nice, small and informal.

The rest of the weekend was spent chilling out, using the pool at the hotel, and doing nothing much really. Popped in to see my Gran before we headed North, and had a visit to DK Motorcycles. Both good visits, my Gran’s new place is really nice, and DK has a massive stock of used bikes and has a resident Parrot.

The chap we spoke to at DK was friendly, talking about the bikes we liked and mentioning some of their stats. They sell over a 100 bikes a week, 5 the previous week going in their van to Scotland. He’d just sold a new bike to a chap in Aberdeen, and it was going up in the van next week. Their stock must run to a hundreds of bikes, so plenty to choose from. And the parrot was friendly too, it kept shouting hello at us from its vantage point above one of the offices, a local too going by its accent! They had a really nice BMW R1100RS in red, so I’m going to keep saving up.

We then headed North, with a brief detour to pick up my Brother’s new size 13 Doc Martin boots that he’d left at the hotel he was staying in.