Pooley Bridge

Well, I'm sat here at 2AM in the morning drinking Kleanprep reflecting on the consequences of overconfidence and the inevitable crashing back down to earth that CF can sometimes give you. There I was, chuffed at how well I had done in the 10K run the previous week, and dispatching (what I thought was) sage advice on the CF Forum on how to avoid gastric blockages, when I get hit by one myself after a weekend of excess in the lakes. Drenched in hubris and gut pains, I am the proverbial Greek tragedy ;-) So here I am drinking the minging sea water brew that is Kleanprep and waiting for it to work its inevitable way through my alimentary canal. Grrrrr...


Anyway, on with the show. This weekend we went camping in Waterside Farm, a *really* nice lakeside campsite by the side of Ullswater. There was a lovely lakeside path that is an hour long walk into Pooley Bridge, a picturesque village to the north of Ullswater. We met up with G and N and their two daughters who are about the same age as Abby and Oscar, and to my relief Abby and M got on pretty well and were soon playing make believe princess games together, not too many arguments either ;-). We had a very relaxed time of it, although in the evening we ended up drinking far too much beer and eating far too many cheap supermarket BBQ burgers at the campsite long after the kids were all tucked up in their beds. It was a good laugh though; G and N are funny, I personally hadn't laughed so much in ages, although I'm afraid most of the humour was of a low (i.e. lavatorial) tone ;-) We put the kids in loads of layers of bedclothes because it gets really cold in the middle of the night in a tent. I'm sure I feel the cold much more as I get older, the cold never used to bother me in the old camping days.

Anyway, the good news is that Oscar went camping for the first time and he passed with flying colours. He only woke once for 5 minutes the first night, and he actually slept all the way through the next night, something he doesn't manager very often at home. We should go definitely go camping more often, especially when the weather was so good!