Sunday 25 July - Torver

Where was Bertie? He returned to Church House Inn campsite at Torver where this time it cost £30 (with electricity)

Saturday night didn't involve much sleep. I'd grabbed an hour and a half in between midnight and 0130, when I'd started watching for Mick going through the final Check Point, after which there was no time before I needed to get fully waterproofed up to head over to the school to see him finish.  

It was 0430 before we were in bed, and 0630 before I was asleep. 

Fortunately, we didn't have to go far on Sunday and there was nothing we needed to do. Even more fortunately, the rain that had fallen in the previous 24 hours had been mainly light and had hit ground that hadn't seen rain in weeks, so there wasn't the issue of needing to exit the field before it turned into a mud bath and people started getting stuck. It was thus gone 11am by the time we called Church House Inn to check they had room for us and tootled off for the <10-minute drive to get there.

I think we've stayed at Church House on Lakeland weekend in four separate years and, off the top of my head, I think we've stayed there on both the Thursday and Sunday night in each year (maybe not on the Sunday 2024, as Mick didn't run, so we wouldn't have been sleep deprived), however, we've always opted to just stay in the car park, without electricity, rather than in one of the camping fields. We again chose to stay in the car park today but with electricity. The price without electricity is £20, and based on current trends, we hadn't expected the 'with' price to be more than £26, so it was a surprise when the owner asked for £30. We also both got the impression by his slight hesitation that he was thinking of 'how much can I get away with charging?', as there are no published rates. Even though there's another campsite almost next door that we knew to be cheaper, as we were already there and parked, we paid up, but with the feeling that we were being ripped off. £10 for electric hook up isn't unheard of, but it's unusually much. 

Why the need for electric? Well, we could have managed without, but Mick had come back with all of his kit absolutely sodden and the fastest way of drying it was in front of the fan heater in Bertie's shower room. I'd like to say that we were at pains to use as much electricity as we reasonably could, and we certainly made an effort to get all electronics fully charged, but then I had an aberration and both boiled water and cooked lunch on the gas hob - doh!

There's nothing much to say about the rest of the day. Mick's knee was very disgruntled and wasn't going to be walking anywhere, so we stayed in, watched the live stream of the L100/50 awards presentation, watched some cricket, slept for 3 hours, watched some more cricket then went to bed.  

 

(Published on 25 August but back-scheduled to 1 August, slightly nearer to when it was written!)