I woke up around 7am today.
I guess I'm still getting used to UK time, not to mention that I'd slept about 14 hours! Had breakfast (just cornflakes,
toast and a couple of delicious chocolates), then went for a bit of a walk. It's quite cold in the morning. Looking down
at the town of Haworth, it's a typical example of the architecture of most country towns I've seen so far. All the houses
are made of the same stone, and all of a similar style. As you can see, it's an interesting effect. The other thing about
the English country-side is that whatever direction you look, you can see examples of human habitation: dry-rock walls,
houses, sheds, monuments.
We drove today to Ambleside in the Lakes District of England. Ambleside is on the northern end of Lake Windemeyer, which is
(I believe) the largest of the lakes in the Lakes District. It's a very beautiful area, like most of the country around here,
there's plenty of stone walls and buildings and the grass is an amazing shade of dark green - so much longer and greener than
the country in Australia. The animals are also much more numerous. You can abviously get a lot more "wear" out of the land
here than you can back home.
We stopped for lunch in a park about halfway between Haworth and Windemeyer. I had a really nice Chicken Tikka sandwich - the English are famous for their sandwiches, and it's well-earned in my opinion! We arrived at the next caravan park, about 6 miles out of Ambleside, around 3pm. The caravan park owner isn't the friendlist person I've ever met but he wasn't outright rude. My mum and my grandmother counldn't help pointing out all the deficiencies in the caravan, though. The small bathroom, the tiny shower (it's too small and it's in like a bathtub thing that makes it impossible for my grandmother to get into), not to mention that there's no bed linned (we had to hire sheets for £1.75 each), no tea & coffee, no towels (not even a tea towel), no dishwashing liquid, etc. I'm a little more laid-back, and point out that we may as well buy all that stuff anyway because you never know what the next place we're going to will have.
After we got here, we had to go to the shops, and then to the pub for dinner. I drove the car for the first time then (it's a Ford Mondeo - not bad, the engine is a little under-powered and the clutch is very sticky. The gears are nice and close together, though). The roads around the country are very smooth and very nice. I haven't seen a single dirt road yet.
The food at the pub was absolutely amazing. I was told before I came here that food is quite expensive, but so far I haven't seen it. I guess if you spend all your time converting between pounds and Aussie dollars, then maybe it does work out to be more expensive, but I haven't really been doing that. I had 1/2 a roast chicken for only £8.95, and you also got a lot of chips (chips here are so much better than Australian chips!). My mum had an "atlantic salad" which was mostly salmon and prawns and some salad and stuff. It was only £7.95, but you got heaps. Salmon is apparently really cheap here, certainly much cheaper than Australia!
Anyway, I ended up going to sleep around 9pm. Still a little earlier than what I'm used to, but I think I'm almost over the jet-lag now.