Day 11 - more excuses

Basically a day of driving after another poor night's sleep. To be honest though, glad to be out of the city. Not that we haven't enjoyed London (nor Paris for that matter) per se, but rather the frantic rushing around and trying to balance getting to see as much as we can in the available time with staying as rested as possible so as to pace ourselves - probably hasn't been entirely successful, particularly in the resting stakes, but hopefully we will all look back on our time away with fondness rather than fatigue.

Left the hotel at about 9 o'clock and got to Windermere at about 3.30, only about an hour after Google suggested we would get there without stopping, so not too bad, having stopped a couple of times for lunch etc. (etc. being due mainly to the effect of coffee). Traffic conditions excellent, with only a few small stretches of roadworks slowing us down, but nothing too hampering. What was particularly pleasing to note was that the drivers, almost to a person, are still (from what I remembered) courteous to a fault - none of the Adelaide tendency to undertake on the left-hand side or speed up to close the gap on someone indicating to merge in. Of course I imagine that one must 'play the game' or risk either being taken advantage of, or worse still, inciting a remonstrative toot. Luckily, I don't think we experienced either.

Both the countryside and Windermere pretty much as we remembered it, and I think even the kids were impressed at how picture skew they both are (the countryside and Windermere, not the kids......in this instance). And we've had our first real burst of rain - actually had to have the windscreen wipers on more than just intermittent, and at one point it absolutely bucketed, only to be bright sunshine 10 minutes later. Weather brisk - 9.5° when arrived, but what impressed us most was the quiet. Coupled with what looks like very comfortable beds, we are looking forward to a good night's sleep. Our B&B is probably more like a self-contained apartment, and is very well appointed, spacious and comfortable. No complaints here, so we'll have to wait until tomorrow to try and find something to whinge about.

Further to the difficulties we were having with internet access in London, the problems continue in the Lake District. Despite our accommodation promising free Wi-fi, this would only seem to be the case if one were down at the bottom of the stairs near to the door and close to the router (??) in the manager's office - as there was nothing at the bottom of the stairs other than the bottom of our stairs, I didn't feel like posting blogs sitting down in the cold. I did have the brilliant idea of writing up the blogs on our USB and then cutting and pasting them onto the blog, thereby enabling me to write them in comfort, and then posting them relatively quickly at the bottom of the aforementioned stairs. If only this tablet we are using were so accommodating - try as I might I could not get it to paste what I had written, so we will have to wait until we gain access to a real computer - I hope this tablet doesn't take that comment personally and decide to mutiny.