Holidays in Time 2

I sat with Chris in the front room of his flat. He sat in front of a desktop computer which was on a stand in front of his wooden chair. I sat on the small two seater settee next to his bed which was reserved for customers.
"Chris, I want to go on holiday to the Lake District in 1976."
"You wouldn't be the first," said Chris. "Quite a popular destination. It's got the most beautiful scenery in the world. I'd rather be in the Lake District than be in the Rocky Mountains. Just one problem. It rains all the time. By travelling back in time to 1976 you'll have the best possible weather. You'll need some local currency so take a suitcase full of transistor radios. They were worth a fortune back then. I'll give you the directions to a shop that sells second hand electronic goods. The guy knows me quite well. Take a full set of road maps. No satnavs. No mobile phones. Haven't been invented yet. Have you got a petrol car or an electric car?"
"Petrol."
"You'll be surprised how many people don't think of that. If you think it's difficult to find a charger here, go back to 1976 and you'll end up putting an extension lead through the letterbox of a holiday chalet. Is anyone going with you?"
"My girlfriend and her children."

We were all in the car together. I was driving towards the bus station. The lights on the box Chris had fitted on top of the dashboard started flashing.
"It says enter date and time," said Anita.
"Type 9th July 1976, 10:30 AM." Anita started typing. I drove through the traffic lights next to the bus station. The road changed from a dual carriageway to two lanes. I tried not to collide with the ancient looking green bus that pulled out of the bus station in front of me. The bus conductor gave me an angry look, terrified by a car that had come out of nowhere. We had come out of nowhere. A bright yellow Ford Cortina passed in the other direction. In front of me were a green Austin Maxi and a bright blue Morris Minor van.
"Blimey," said Anita. "We must have gone back fifty years in time."
"Mike," said twelve year old Andy, "why can't I get anything on my mobile phone?"
"Mobile phones haven't been invented yet," I said. "For a mobile phone to work you need to be near a mobile phone mast and you need to have a signal."
"But why won't it work?"
Anita was a good map reader. She directed me on to an A road which we followed for several hours. Through Penrith and on to another A road. Now we were in Keswick. I stopped beside a bed and breakfast. The sign said No Vacancies. So it was with the next three bed and breakfast places. I drove into a hotel car park. Anita went inside and returned a few minutes later.
"They're fully booked."
"I'll find a hotel in Carlisle."
"Carlisle?"
"It's not easy to find a hotel room at short notice in a tourist destination at a time like this."
"But that'll take hours."
"Forty five minutes, according to Google. I checked it before we came. But first we need to go to the shop that sells second hand electrical things." We arrived at the shop Chris had told us about. A man in overalls stood behind the counter. Someone was showing him a radio.
"That's no good to me. It's a DAB radio."
"It's got FM. Sorry, it's got the new VHF."
"It doesn't get Radio 1 and it's got no dial, so it's not much fun to tune. I'll give you a fiver for it." The man took the radio and handed over a £5 note.  He looked at me. I handed him a radio. His eyes lit up as if he had seen a winning lottery ticket. "Six shortwave bands. I'll get a good price for this. I'll give you £20." 
"I know a lot about radios," I said to Anita. I opened the suitcase. There were 20 similar radios in it. 
"£300 for the whole lot," said the man in overalls.
"How about £400?"
"£300 is fair. It's more than you paid for them on Amazon."
"The one you have in the window is £40."
The man went to the other end of the shop and came back with some money.
"£350," he said. I shook my head. "£350, take it or leave it. Do you know how much money £350 is in 1976? People earn £1 an hour. I earn £50 a week. You can fill up your car with petrol for £5."
"Thank you," I said and took the money.

We drove to Carlisle. We didn't need a satnav to get to the hotel we could see in the town centre. No bus lanes. No one way system. I just drove straight there. It was expensive. £10 a night for each room. We gave them £140 for two rooms for a week. I lay down to sleep that night pleased with myself that I had managed to solve all the practical problems of taking a holiday 50 years in the past. Or at least most of them. I had brought my family to a beautiful place in boiling hot weather for a fraction of the cost of a package holiday abroad.

The next day we drove to Hawse Water reservoir. We had a long walk around the mountain paths. It was blazing hot sunshine.
"You can see the buildings under the water," said 11 year old Lisa.
"That's because it used to be a village," said Anita. "They flooded the village to make it into a reservoir."
"Wouldn't the people all drown?"
"I should think they moved the people out first, stupid," said Andy, laughing. 
"That's not as stupid as thinking that your mobile phone would still work when they haven't been invented yet and there's no transmitters." Anita had made some sandwiches and we had brought a bottle of lemonade. We sat down at a picnic table and had lunch. In the car park, that afternoon, I was reversing out of a narrow gap very carefully, trying not to hit the van right beside me or the gatepost close behind me. It required a great deal of concentration, so much so that I didn't see the red Ford Escort estate that was coming into the car park entrance. I reversed into one of the doors. The driver got out of the escort. So did I. I had been travelling slowly but had still left quite a dent in the door. I took out a pen and some paper.
"What's your phone number?" I asked. We exchanged phone numbers. I went down into the town centre, found a call box and phoned the insurance company.
"What's your name?"
"Michael Ellis." There was a long pause and a sound of the drawers of a filing cabinet being opened and closed.
"I don't think we have any customers called Ellis. What sort of car is it?"
"A Citroen. 2020 registration. It's the bigger Citroen C3."
"What's your date of birth?"
"19th February 1978. Hello? Hello?"

A few days later we were having breakfast in the hotel. I had started on my grapefruit, meaning to move on to my cornflakes and bacon and egg later. Anita looked anxious.
"The kids are all sunburnt," she said. Lisa and Andy both had red faces. "I've been putting sun cream on them. How can they be sunburnt when I've been putting sun cream on them?"
"The sun cream's not as good here as it is in our century. It never used to have the factor written on it. I don't think it's any better than factor 6. We'd better take it easy today. Just go on a cruise around Lake Windermere. Give them time to recover. Then just go for a short easy walk tomorrow. We've only got two days left."

Back in the 21st century one of Chris' other customers sat down with his doctor discussing his arthritis.
"Very strange," said the doctor. "You are sixty years old but you seem to have the body of an eighty year old."
"Oh no. All of those long holidays are catching up with me."
"Explain?"
"I've got a time machine in my car. I go to the traffic lights next to Tesco's. I go on a round the world cruise and come back five minutes after I left. That way I never have to take any time off work."
"How very convenient. I wish I could do that."
"And I hate getting up at four o' clock in the morning. I've got an alarm clock with a snooze button and every minute lasts an hour. Set the alarm to eight minutes to four and it's like getting up at lunchtime. But I've been doing it for too long. I've been doing it for, well, twenty years. Look Doctor, I do a responsible job. I'm an architect. I wouldn't get complicated buildings past planning departments if I was delusional. I'm not mad, at least I hope I'm not."
"I hope you're not mad because I want to know where you got your time machine and your alarm clock from. I want to do the same thing myself. I just hope that the government don't find out. They'll force everybody to do it. They're looking for a way to solve the pension crisis."