I am on holiday, Day 18

I should point out that the days (i.e., Day 18) does not refer to today (Monday), but to the day I am writing the post about (in this case, Saturday). Why do I do this?  I know you do not care, but in the olden days people would notice such things and write me odd emails. I didn't know what to do with the emails then, and I wouldn't know now, so I thought I would "head it off at the pass", as I believe Alexander the Great once said.

We drove from Inverness to Skye and from Skye to Glasgow (both very nice routes if you are looking out of the window and/or used to British roads; neither are advised if you have only ever driven on American highways).  Our final morning in Glasgow was tinged with whisky breath and sadness knowing, as we did, that we must leave our pals and go South, but before we left we received two special gifts of love: an unexpectedly foxy statue of Darwin and his monkey friend (both are in the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow, should you wish to see Darwin's carved buttocks up close):

 




































And this sign of excellence, depicting a shop owned by a man whose teeth were not a good advertisement for his services:

We left Glasgow and drove towards the Lake District, remembering to stop at the Tebay Services, as recommended by our excellent Glaswegian hosts. My word! If only all motorway service stations were like this! The world would be better, and full of people eating delicious lunches and coffee cake and buying nice pottery on their way to somewhere organic. All they would need to do is add some bedrooms and I would spend all my holidays there eating their fruit cake and looking at their pies.

Our B&B in the Lake District was an Inn, i.e. a pub with rooms upstairs and food and all of that - clearly the best idea in the world ever (apart from Tebay Services).

 Here is the bed we slept in:

To get to this quite nice room, you leave the nice pub and cross a tiled floor that smells of loo cleaner left over from 1972. It spoils the effect somewhat, as does the hair of the previous guest stuck to the wall with lemon shower gel.

This was the view out of our bedroom window.

Dinner was strange. The potted shrimp were hot, the lamb free of lambyness, and the potatoes so abundant that I could have set up a chip stand out of the back of the horsebox across the road.  An American lady at the table came in sweating, and leant saucily across the table to whisper loudly to her Spanish lady companion that she "found the steak was looking most provocative".  We did not wait to find out what happened next, and, weighed down by potatoes, spent the night in a sweat thinking about the hair in the shower.

The next day, fortified by strange toast, we set off for Yorkshire.  Yes. Yorkshire. The best place in all of the world, perhaps.

Pip "hiyaaaa!" Pip

NWM