Saturday 7 June 2014

Holiday time again!

Once again, we get to early June, and so it is time for our main holiday of the year. This year we have decided to go somewhere new for us, the Lake District. We have been here before, ten years ago, but only for a couple of nights at a hotel in Grange-over-Sands, which is right at the southern end of the Lakes, and is not really considered to properly be "in the lakes". We did briefly visit a few places while we were there, but this time, we hope to do it all "properly".

We are staying in a Victorian terraced cottage in Ambleside. It is a two bedroomed place with a large kitchen/dining room, and a huge bathroom with his and hers basins, a large bath with a shower over. The whole place has been well renovated to a high standard, appears to be spotlessly clean and is well equipped, having a dishwasher, fridge, microwave and washing machine in the kitchen as well as the usual oven and hob.

All the floors are solid wood, none of your laminate malarkey thank you very much! It is double glazed, centrally heated and apart from the fact it is on the main road, so a bit noisy, and the parking a bit difficult to access, is ideal. Lake Windermere is about 50 yards away, and we can catch a boat from the pier if we want to. Within 5 minutes walk are several eating places, and I have a funny feeling that the fish and chip one will have to be visited early in our stay!

It poured with rain for all of our journey here, but thankfully, the M6 was not too busy, and there we're no major hold ups along the way. We did pay a quick pit stop visit to one of the service stations for a cup of mint tea and a cake, but apart from that, the drive was uneventful.

Until we got to the town of Windermere itself that is. We knew that there was a branch of Booths supermarket there, and the plans was to get some provisions there, as we know from previous visits up t'north that Booths are a VERY good chain of supermarkets, much along the lines of Waitrose.

We hit the snag of lack of decent signage. It was very easy to spot the supermarket itself, but how you actually got to it was far from clear. Using intuition, lack of patience and bad language, after a couple of times around the town centre (and once around the train station) we finally found the car park. It was worth the effort, and we got all of what we needed there before heading on the last few miles to Ambleside itself.

The office of the letting company was fairly easy to find, and we soon had the keys to the cottage. Finding the parking space was less easy, and made us wish for a much narrower car, as the back alley we had to negotiate was rather tight. Even tighter though was the angle to get into the parking space. Sally eventually mastered it, but I suspect that we may well try to use the carpark down the road in future when we can!

We have settled in now, I've had a couple of cups of tea to try to ease my thumping headache, and as the rain has pretty much stopped now, we are hoping to go for a walk later down to the lake and along into the town.
















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