A lovely day out

Yesterday, I took a cheeky jaunt up north to spend the day with family. The weather held up ok and didn't rain until much later in the day, when we were safely hidden indoors, sipping cups of tea.

Mid-morning, we set out for a mini adventure to Frodsham Hill. Despite taking a wrong turn early on and coming out at the top in a different place than we expected to, it was lovely all the same and the sun shone bright, although it was cold.





Midway up, I realised that I was really panting with all the stair climbing! Hard to believe I once trekked the Great Wall of China... True story.





When we got to the top there was a lovely wide view of the surrounding area. With large flat areas, it's hard to make it look good on a photo but anyway, here's the view.





Soon after this, we reached the WW1 memorial....





...which is next door to a lovely hotel, positioned on the top of the hill so that, if you get a seat by the window, you can have lunch with the beautiful view. We had planned to have lunch there yesterday but they have a no-lunches-at-the-weekend rule so we wandered back down the hill via the roads and found a nice little country pub serving food (I was upset by their lack of apostrophes though).





After waiting quite a while for the food to arrive, I got the breaded duck's egg with pancetta...





....and the Thai crab cakes with lime





After this, we headed back to the car, again making a slight directional error which took us off down a different road and we came out quite far from where we needed to be but it was nice to be outside walking so we didn't mind.

Also, we found a place called Castle Park, a National Lottery funded thing which had, amongst other things, a children's art centre. We found some of this new 'graffiti' knitting stuff too. Has anyone else heard of this?





People knit colourful strips then put them around things, like here on a post or maybe a bollard, to brighten the place up! It officially counts as graffiti but as it's quite pretty, the police are 'overlooking' it for now. I kind of want to get into this!

After all this, we drove back, put the kettle on and settled in for an evening of Grand Designs Australia, which was actually quite interesting, before I jumped on the train to London.