As per usual Christmas was super busy and that clearly meant I was traveling all over which means another service station review. I am actually getting people read these and tell me about them and I can’t decide if people think I’m just sad or funny. Hummm.

Moving on, somewhat unbelievably I have never been on the M6 Toll as I have never been bothered to pay the £3.95 or whatever it is for the joy of driving on a really boring bit of motorway. However, having traveled on the M6 three times in the same week for magic gigs in Cheshire and Birmingham over Christmas I thought I would just go crazy and try the Toll; what a revelation! Because you have to pay to use the road, there is not a crap car in sight, its brilliant!

Generally speaking there are no lorries (they are saving their £3.95 for a bacon butty at the next truck stop) and no knackered old Fiestas driven by a 17-year-old who needs to save his £3.95 for his next sovereign ring, innit, (at least that’s what I think they say). As such the normal people of the world can speed along with no hold ups. Marvelous.

And that brings me to the service station review. To be fair, its already off to a cracking start as once again the car park is full of neatly parked cars of a nice nature. Its kind of a middle class service station as you can’t get there without paying the Toll. Genius.

According to good old Wikipedia the services were opened in 1994 and claimed to be “the best service area on Britain’s motorway network”, well I think this blog will be the judge of that. Seriously though (can this ridiculous feature ever be serious?!) the facilities are really decent. The car parking and landscaping are nice and there is a good offering of food outlets including Costa (in fact 3 Costa outlets in the same building), a Wimpy and a Roadchef restaurant. I actually braved ordering a mixed grill and to be fair it was actually pretty good. Its no Claridge’s but for service station food it was good. The toilets were OK too, not the best but OK.

I’m never surprised at what they sell in those shops that are in services these days, it just to be the case that you were lucky if you could get a packet of AA Batteries but now they seem to sell a crazy array of things. When I was there it was tents, children’s laser guns and power drills on offer. I can imagine that would make an interesting feature for a family in the back of the car down the M6.

All in all it was a very decent stop, earning a very respectable 8.5/10. Good work.

p.s. in my quick google search I actually found a website devoted to service stations in the UK, oh how the internet has changed the lives of thousands.

More tomorrow kids. The Tom Rose Magic Blog: http://www.trmagic.com/tom_rose_blog.php