Jun 09 2013

Getting Parked in Coworth Park

The flight last night was smooth and we even managed to get some sleep. We arrived on schedule at 2:30 pm local time and walked about a mile to the UK Border clearing area where, armed with our Fast Track passes we figured we’d be whisked right through customs. However, our first experience in the UK in a number of years, turned into a 45 minute wait in the “Fast Track” line. Even though there were far fewer people in our line there were many more agents handling the “Slow Poke” line and they got through much faster. I don’t remember this happening when I (Dale) used to come over here once a month when we had a couple offices here.

After collecting our bags we managed to find our driver holding a sign with a badly mangled version of our last name and walked to the Car Park and his smallish Mercedes sedan. After cramming our bags in the car (the car was small and our bags were big!) we exited the parking space and found out that our driver didn’t know how to exit the garage. After circling the very tight parking garage a couple times we drove the 15 miles in about 30 minutes on the M25 motorway and a few roundabouts on the A30 and A329 to arrive at the beautiful hotel grounds of Coworth Park. What a great surprise! Although we knew it would be nice we were treated to a beautiful property complete with people riding beautiful horses around the grounds and many acres of well maintained grass that included two full-sized polo fields.

A nice girl from the South of Italy checked us in and took us in a golf cart trolley to our room which three years ago, prior to a massive remodel project, were horse stables!

We were hoping to see a polo match but unfortunately we arrived a bit too late for that and the next one was going to be on Tuesday. Too bad. We found out that next week is the world famous Ascot horse race and the hotel will be absolutely packed with rates probably twice (or more) than we were paying. The past couple days the hotel was full of Russians and the hotel was built by an Arab family. A real cosmopolitan place.

We had dinner on property (quite nice) and then drifted off to a good nights sleep in our nice second story suite.

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