What is England without visiting a few stately homes? Up until now, we hadn’t bothered with any, but if there is one you need to do in the UK it’s definitely Chatsworth House.
Chatsworth House was built in 1549 and has been in the Cavendish family for 16 generations. Money and ambition bought to the family by Bess of Hardwick built the massive building, Chatsworth was her idea and conception. An interesting woman herself, it seems like she set the family up for success and women’s money improved/saved the family for generations to come.
Chatsworth is in many movies, but most famous of all, many variations of Pride and Prejudice. Can you imagine the cleaning?! Lesley always said of Buckingham Palace, that it was filthy. Chatsworth was immaculate. I asked a guide how they manage to keep it so clean. Apparently they only have 2 hours (7am to 10am), each and every day, so it must be a significant number of cleaners!
From here we moved on to Harewood House. The reason for visiting Harewood is that my Gran nursed here during WW2. it was definitely interesting to see a building that a) she talked about so much, especially “nursing with the Princess Royal” of the time and b) seeing vistas and views that are the same as her war time photos (but with her in them!).
Winding ourselves closer to the Lakes District (home of Peter Rabbit and Beatrix Potter) for our next major peak, Scafell Pike, we realised that we would be relatively close to a couple that had been on our African trip in 2017.
A quick message a few days ago ascertained that Stacey and Gary were indeed going to be in Cumbria!
We were staying in Coniston and meeting them for dinner in Grasmere, a short 14m drive (22kms), shouldn’t take that long, but easily took 35 minutes as we wound ourselves around the tiny lanes and hills of Cumbria.
I made a comment that it was fortuitous that our timing worked out to see both Stacey and Gary on this trip. Gary works on off shore oil and gas rigs, so it really was a stroke of luck to catch the both of them. Dinner was fabulous…..but I ate it before it got a photo (common issue of mine)! It was like no time had passed at all as we all descended into the usual catch up chats and the reminders of our great trip to Africa…… falling down hills, crazy cycling trips, rampaging wildlife and a brief reminder of how Gary has been banned for life from Nigeria and Egypt! 🤣🤣🤣
Two glasses of wine in, we’ve managed to convince Stacey to join us on our hike up Scafell Pike (I’m not sure how Gary got out of it, but dog sitting is a flimsy excuse!), which will be the next adventure in the morning! Wooooo……!
So, off to conquer the next (and smallest) of our hills!
Work Travel Save Repeat 