M&G's Blog: Saturday 3 October

Weather: Wall-to-wall sunshine, with a high of 15

An early start (for a Saturday, on holiday), and a 0750 departure from the campsite to arrive at Lyme Park just a couple of minutes after the gates opened at 0830. Our first activity of the day was a parkrun, which quickly overtook other contenders and put it in my top spot of the most spectacular parkrun I've taken part in to date. The glorious sunshine no doubt helped, but the surroundings were outstanding.

It's up there in the lumpiest three parkrun courses we've done too, with the other two being in Germany. I ran those, but was more than happy to stay with Mick today, and he's still rehabbing his knee with a run-walk programme (it's going well so far - he ran far more of today's course than he has in recent weeks on other, easier courses, so that's promising).

A cup of tea, bun, wash and change in Erica, and it was 1030, so we thought we'd go and look at the gardens before the house opened at 11. That we did, followed by a visit to the ticket office to collect the token that acts as an entrance ticket into the house. We were not just given the token, but asked if we wanted to join the 'behind the scenes' tour that was starting at 1130. We didn't hesitate, happily accepting the last two available tickets.

It was a good one: as the name suggests, it visits parts of the property not generally open to the public, with the theme of this one being the servants.

That lasted fifty minutes, and was hungry work, so a cup of tea and a pasty in the cafe was next on the agenda, whereafter we found that cake was necessary to further bolster our energy for visiting the house.

That's where we were headed when I pointed out that the next introductory talk to the property was taking place in the chapel in just over five minutes' time, so we thought we may as well listen to that too. We turned out to be the only takers - a shame as the volunteer who ran through the family's history (the property was in the same family from 1398 to 1946, when it was handed over to the National Trust) was excellent.

I doubt there were many (or any) other people on the property today who arrived at 0830 and didn't even start looking at the house until 1330! And I'd said on arrival that I thought we'd be back at Bertie early today, as I didn't think Lyme was going to hold our attention for too long.

By 1530 we were flagging and headed back to Erica, but it had been another excellent day out.

We're off home tomorrow for a bit of a rest before we head up to Scotland later in the week...

(After a few days of permitting photos to go in chronological order, Blogger has decided they're going in reverse today)

Three months ago, I started an exclusion diet to try to improve the migraine situation. It was very successful, insofar as it almost stopped the migraines (going from up to five per week to one per month), but unsuccessful in not really identifying what was causing them (the answer: some unknown threshold of some combination of things that's going to be impossible to pin down). One of the items that I decided I can live without, and haven't really reintroduced, is cake. This is only the second time I've had cake, and we went sharsies.

The exterior of Lyme played the part of Pemberley in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and this is the lake in which Mr Darcy famously took a dip (but only in the adaptation, not in the book). I've watched that series more times than I would like to admit. I think I need to watch it again now.

The front of the property. Seems I didn't take a snap of the big courtyard that sits in the middle (as it would, or it wouldn't really be a courtyard).

parkrun snaps: