Some time ago, we'd visited the Tree Cathedral at Whipsnade, and M was quite taken with it, so we decided to head for the Dunstable Downs area. A quick glance at the map showed that the Downs were out as far as seeing the sunrise was concerned, mainly because they face west! So we turned off the A5, through Kenworth rather than go all the way up to the Downs themselves.
The morning was surprisingly clear, and it was already quite light 20 minutes or so before the sunrise. The arboretum itself was quite muddy, so we just parked on the approach road facing east and waited for the sun to come up in the increasingly pink sky over Whipsnade Church.
In no time at all, the light was dispersed and clouds were starting to gather. I took a quick walk around the arboretum which, in the bare depths of winter was sadly nowhere near as magical as we'd remembered.
And so we headed for home, taking the non-motorway route which followed the Gade river all the way into Hemel Hempstead. We were finally rewarded with the kind of sunrise I'd initially hoped for as we drove toward the south-east, so I stopped the car and took one final photo of the solstice sun coming up in all its glory:
