Vacation Day 2

I'm getting started posting about my vacation. To read in order, scroll down.

Vacation blog day 2
Sunday, August 01, 2010
This morning the children used all the milk with their breakfast, and the frozen milk hadn’t thawed yet, so Bob and I didn’t get breakfast. For some reason this was VERY bad. But we are very clever people, and remembered seeing a Cooperative grocery store in Richmond yesterday. The Coop in Lakenheath is open from 6 or 7 am to 11pm 7 days per week, so I felt confident that the big store here would be open. Wrong! Opens 11 on Sunday. We first arrived there at 10:25, so we went back down the main drag to fill up with gas, and then back to wait for opening. So we finally got breakfast fixings at lunch time. Bob not being happy with the peanut butter crackers I’d brought for our lunches, we also got bread and lunch meat and cheese, and since we were there anyway we got burger buns to go with the sloppy joe meat I’d put in the crockpot before leaving.

So back to the cottage to put the milk in the fridge, and since Elijah was fussy I got him out to feed him, and then we decided to go ahead and let everyone have lunch. We ate outside at the picnic table to keep things interesting. Especially so as it started raining halfway through. I’d started yesterday’s clothes in the washer before we left, and we went ahead and got that out and into the “clothes dryer” which our cottage guide book suggested we use instead of the line if the weather was bad. It took us some time to find it, but Bob finally spotted it, folded up behind the ironing board. Yeah, a clothes RACK, not a “tumble dryer.”

So we were finally away at 12:30 (ish). We took a drive West through the Yorkshire Dales National Park, discovering, first of all, that our local village shop was indeed open on Sunday (unheard of in East Anglia). Oh, well. We followed the narrow winding roads a ways and then turned down a narrower, more winding road to go up and over the mountain at Buttertubs Pass. Bob stopped once to take pictures and I sat trembling with my eyes on the floorboard lest I encourage nightmares of falling down cliffs. About 10 minutes past the crest of the hill I was able to relax my grip on my seat a bit. It is entirely one thing to say “narrow and winding” and another thing to experience a one lane road, lined on both sides with rock walls, and chosen to be the location of both a bicycle race and a motorcycle rally. As Bob says, if a road can’t allow both a car and a motorcycle, it is just too narrow.

Anyway, we ended up at Hardraw Force, England’s tallest unbroken waterfall. It was a short walk down a muddy path, and we all enjoyed that. Well, all but Elijah. Poor boy, he just wants to get down in the mud. We took a broader road toward home, until we turned off again. This narrow winding road was more like a paved driveway – no borders or markings of any kind. It was free-range sheep country, criss-crossed by footpaths and bridleways, though I can hardly imagine walking across that bare mountain, shuffling through the heather and sheep poo, head down against the cold wind. Gives real background to some of those books I’ve read.

We passed by Bolton Castle, which was closed but will be open Tuesday, and came on home for dinner and early bed. It’s 8:45 and I’m done.
I must say, Bob’s being on vacation has enabled me to have a vacation as well. All day there has been a chorus of “Daddy, Daddy!” and I don’t have to answer all those wonderful questions. I can even go to the bathroom without worrying about anybody. Awesome.