Sunday –

We had to jolly old England along this morning, long before we ever set down in Great Britain.  Our transfer to Frankfurt airport left the ship at 7am (naturally I didn’t get any sleep past 3:30am), so we had an early start packing Sheila, finding ourselves cups of life-sustaining tea & coffee, and winding up our accounts.  Then, at the crack of 6:50am (never late in Germany!) we jumped into our van for the hour ride to the airport with another couple flying back to Delaware, and Dorothy, a pint-sized, fragile little 85-year old Brit, who was the charmer of the cruise.  Dorothy was a little unsteady on her feet, so we jollied her along, and took charge of her checking in/checking baggage, getting to the gate, etc. while she teetered along beside us, clutching to one of our arms or the other.  She was cute going thru Security:  I asked if she had any toothpaste or liquids that needed to be removed from her bag, she said she only had sunscreen but that was at the bottom of her bag and she wasn’t going to go digging for it.  Well, Security didn’t care about the suntan lotion, it was the litre of wine at the top of her purse they had issue with!!!  We left her chatting up a storm as she passed thru UK immigration control, while we impatiently waited in the non-resident line to be stamped in.

Then it was pretty easy sailing.  Manchester airport is quite small and so easy to navigate.  We picked up the rental car without problem except that it’s huge!  I reserved a compact car with automatic shifting, and got one a good 3′ longer and wider than the manuals!  I hope my lefty-driving skills can deal with this behemoth.  Portia (our GPS) was a bit stubborn reporting for duty so I had a slight panic attack that mom might have to navigate 🙂  luv you mom!  But crisis was averted and the 3 of us headed off for the Peak District.

The day could not have been more super.  Sun, glorious sun; brilliant blue skies; emerald green fields = heaven.  We stopped a couple of times for some photo ops…

Peak District is manna for bikers

and then sometimes we didn’t actually stop…

our southern view, Chatsworth in distance

Bubnell Cliff Farm is a working dairy farm and our B&B for the next 2 nights.  It has just two guest rooms, both with wonderful views over the countryside, but ours has a bathroom you could play football in!

We organized our bar, and then settled in for the evening with a nice little picnic dinner in our room watching the cows come home…