Chauffeur Services in Henley-on-Thames

Wednesday to Sunday at the start of July, regatta week alters every road in the town. Arriving traffic goes onto the Fair Mile and the A4155 towards Marlow, temporary parking fields open on both banks, and on the Saturday and Sunday evenings the exit is slow whichever route you pick. So we set down before the crowd builds, agree a collection point off the main approach, and keep your chauffeur with the car right through the day.

Take the regatta away and those same roads behave quite differently. Through Mill End the A4155 to Marlow narrows and slows behind agricultural traffic, while the climb towards Nettlebed and Stonor is a proper Chilterns lane, full of blind bends. Heathrow makes the A404 the sensible spine, though from seven in the morning the M4 between junctions eight and nine holds traffic. Riverside houses along the Wargrave road frequently have narrow gates, worth mentioning in advance.

On a long journey, Britain's weather does more damage than its traffic ever will. Winter afternoons close in early, and that matters a great deal when the final leg is a single-track road. Highland and moorland routes can run substantially longer than any summer estimate suggests. Those allowances go into the timings from the start, rather than being discovered together halfway up a glen. Where a departure hour makes the schedule uncomfortable, we propose a better one.

Demand tracks the calendar closely. Bank holiday weekends fill fast, so do the weeks either side of Christmas, the summer wedding season and those university terms that all begin and end together. The further from London a journey runs, the sooner a car wants committing to it. Midweek travel in the shoulder months, by contrast, is the easiest thing in the world to arrange.