Day #5 - Nottingham Travelodge
December the fifth. A service station can be both a blessing and a curse, however the curse is a curse of consistency and similarity. A repetition that's comforting and reassuring. However Nottingham E.M Airport Donnington M1 is much more than that. A temple of gargantuan size that had risen out of the surrounding Tarmac. A cathedral of necessity, a fortress of ambiguous comfort. It's labelled and tagged majesty, glass fronted and glistening in the moon light.
The hotel lay within. Not just a home for the night but a bastion of possibilities. A great gangway led us to a maze of corridors with a quantity of rooms, so many that we could only marvel. Weary travellers hung about the halls and we exchanged brief but meaningful eye contact, in the knowledge we were both impossibly different but perfectly aligned as we have come to roost in the same nest. We are the lucky ones and that sets our minds to rest. We spent the night laughing and drinking and enjoying each other's company, which was easy to do in such opulent surroundings.
It is a wonderfully bright morning, refreshing showers all round and after hunting down fresh clothes from the bottom of our bags, we went down into the food hall. The glass windows rose from gleaming floor to magnificent ceiling allowing for fresh beams of sunlight to spring and shoot across the slick, shining surfaces of Burger King, West Country Cornish pasty and M&S to name a few. The vast space made sure it included a Harvester and that is where we ate. A bounty of similar colour and consistency, and a selection of dips and sauces that were surprisingly vast in number and yet unchanging in flavour. With that we hit the road with our minds on nothing more than the majesty we had become a part of. The Travelodge, as always a constant in our lives. A joy.
Written by Charles Bush
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