Birthday Surprise

Dan has been planning something for absolutely weeks now! For my birthday, I was to have a surprise weekend. It started with dinner on Saturday night at Ask, followed by a night in the Staff of Life, a lovely little country pub just next door to Calke Abbey!

After a good nights sleep and a superb cooked breakfast, Dan took me on some lovely walks in the parkland at Calke Abbey.

 Featuring my birthday wellybobs!

I was pleased to realise that the walk that we had chosen went past Calke's second bird hide. We saw a mandarin duck in a tree, heard a woodpecker and saw both Great Tits and Blue Tits, and a Lesser Spotted Dan-Tit :P

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We had a brief walk around the gardens and Home Farm to see the baby baa lambs. Our plan was to get a pot of tea and a scone, but the cafes were so busy that we decided to finish our walk and visit somewhere else for some refreshments.

We walked past the ponds and through the Serpentine Woods back to our car, parked by the Old Man of Calke. Dan decided to get a cuppa at Cattows Farm, but surprisingly, they were full up too! So we stopped off on the way home to get some cream cakes and had a cuppa at home instead!!


Thank you Pappy for a lovely birthday weekend :)

Evening Stroll

You might remember last years post about British Summer Time, and lo and behold, we are having the same problem this year, bed time is tricky. After being stuck at home all day waiting for a new fridge freezer to be delivered (ours went bang, or rather buzz...) we decided to go for a walk, a long walk around Bradgate Park.

 We must have walked miles, up to Old John, down to the stream, back up to climb the rocks. Eventually the sun turned golden and began to hide between the trees.

 We walked and walked and walked, until the small boy was getting sleepy. He stayed awake all the way home, climbed straight into bed and went straight to sleep.

It worked!!