Before we left on our trip, Kathryn kept telling me that driving in Britain was not like driving in Canada.  What looks like a short driving distance takes a long time to travel.  Although there are lots of motorways, none of them seem to go directly were we wanted to go.  Today was a good example: a 256 mile trip took over six hours to complete.  Although it started out foggy - I think that's every day in Scotland - the good news: it was a beautiful day for driving later in the day.
 

With Kathryn in the navigator’s seat, we headed southwest out of Edinburgh early in the foggy morning to reach the M74 motorway which we then took Carlisle, England, enjoying the Scottish countryside as we went.  Here we picked up the M6 to Lancaster, driving through the eastern edge of the Lake District, one of the most beautiful areas we have seen.  We then exited onto regular two-lane roads, which sometimes became single lane roads as we drove through the Midlands.  We passed through countless lovely villages

Beautiful scenery in northwestern England

the speed limit was often 30 mph.  We finally arrived at our Travelodge Hotel in Alfreton, which was 12 miles north of Nottingham.

We had planned to do laundry today as we were running out of clean clothes.  There was no laundry in Alfreton and the ones in the towns close by were closed on Saturdays and Sundays.  We stopped at Tesco, a giant supermarket and bought food for supper and tomorrow's lunch.  We had originally planned to go to Sherwood Forest and Nottingham but we were tired after our long day of driving.