Mrs Pete and I are going to go to the coast sometime in the not too distant future.
More than that, we're going to go without the caravan, and with no offspring and no dogs.
We're going to stay in an hotel (note the use of 'an' in front of 'hotel' rather than 'a'. It's posh enough to warrant an 'an', you see), and we're going to do stuff that you can't do if you're hauling a pantechnicon full of offspring and dogs around with you.
Stuff like walk to the pub at lunchtime, have a few leisurely sherbets and a spot of nosh and then potter back to the hotel with a view to whatever might take our fancy.
You know.
We'll have breakfast and lunch and dinner cooked by someone else, and be quite happy for that someone else - or more likely a different one - to take all the dirty plates away and wash them up. We'll probably read the newspaper over morning coffee, too.
Anyway, that's by the by.
I was sitting here - still am, in truth - having a look at this and that on the computer, as you do, and I thought I'd put our destination into a couple of the online route finders just to while away a few idle minutes.
It's not that I don't know how to get to Aldeburgh or anything, 'cos we've been there before, but for some reason I wasn't entirely satisfied that we'd gone (and indeed come back) by the most efficacious route, both from a distance and time-of-journey point of view.
The results were more interesting than I could have possibly imagined.
The AA routefinder gave a distance-to-target of 218.1 miles, and a journey time of what I considered to be a rather tardy four hours and twenty-two minutes.
Google maps gave a not dissimilar distance of 217 miles dead for the same route and a time of four hours and sixteen minutes. The difference of 1.1 miles in journey length is a little puzzling, and I can only assume that the Google route takes the racing line through some of the less well-trafficked bends out in the Suffolk countryside, and takes the tangential approach to negotiating roundabouts rather than staying in lane as is recommended.
The RAC routefinder's distance, on the other hand, was slightly less at 216.67 miles, but to say that the journey time it gave me was a surprise is something of an understatement.
It was a complete revelation.
Their journey time was a lightning-fast three hours and thirty-one minutes. Can you believe that?
Three hours and thirty-one minutes? That's fifty minutes less than the pathetic effort provided by the AA. Fifty minutes!
I checked both the AA and Google web pages to make sure that I hadn't inadvertently put a small tick in the 'Will you be wearing a hat in the car?' box, or indeed the 'Will you be stopping in a layby on the A14 to brew a nice cuppa on a small Primus stove balanced on a folding table?' box, but I hadn't.
I can only assume that ticking the 'Fastest Route' box on the RAC website meant exactly what it said. That it had calculated the journey time on the assumption that you were going to drive as fast as was physically possible, ignoring all the speed limits and throwing caution to the winds.
It was most encouraging, and I think that if I need to reconnoitre a route again, I'll use the RAC routefinder.
Best of all, the RAC journey time prediction wasn't content with giving you its results in hours and minutes.
No sir.
Not only did it give you the journey distance down to the nearest foot, their elapsed time prediction was a militarily precise three hours, thirty-one minutes and forty-nine seconds.
I liked that.
Out of interest, I swapped the starting point and the destination around, and let the RAC calculate the journey in reverse. Not actually driving it in reverse, you understand. That's asking for an horrendous crick in the neck at the very least.
The return journey over the same route is shorter at 215.94 miles, and considerably quicker at 3:30:16. Maybe it takes a shortcut through a petrol station forecourt at some point, which would account for part of the shorter distance and indeed some of the reduced journey time. The rest of the reduction is probably the result of the road surface having 'rubbered in' later in the day, giving more grip and thereby permitting a faster cornering speed.
Most excellent, and impressively thorough.
Having been put off joining the RAC by a surly tabard-wearing type in a motorway services who smelled of fags and who tried to intimidate me into becoming a member, I've now had a change of heart and will seriously consider them the next time I need to renew some breakdown cover.
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