Wednesday's weather forecast was due to be torrential rain for Cumbria so the Glums decided to strike out alone and visit Ulverston (birth place of Stan Laurel). They hadn't been gone 10 minutes when my phone rang, it was Bambi, "Did your dad (Shouty Grandad) get his tooth knocked out when he was a child? I've just met a bloke who says his brother did!"
We decided to do a recce of Ladyhall where my paternal great grandfather and his family once lived and worked a farm on the salt marsh.
We had a drive arouns and spotted where we thought the abandoned farm buildings might be but didn't know where the path down to it was so I'll have to revisit with my parents another time.
We headed out to The High Cross Inn at Broughton, a pub/hotel/restaurant I have passed hundreds of times but never been in. The pub is very welcoming, even with a little nook where you can chose a book and sit and read. I spoke to the landlady (of only 9 weeks) about how the area gets in your veins, she agreed. There was a varied and interesting menu, I had Cumbrian chicken stuffed with black pudding in mustard seed sauce - lovely. As we ate, we looked out of the conservatory across the Duddon Valley at the heavy rain pounding down.
We headed back to the campsite and arrived just as a massive cloudburst opened and started to flood the site. Mr Fink checked the tent to find one of the zips had been left open, the tent was full of 2 inches of water! So when the rain stopped, Bambi, Bambino, Mr Fink and I bailed out the tent, dried it out, repegged it (with new pegs - the family that borrowed the tent last, forgot to put the pegs back in the bag - DOH!) and rearranged the sleeping compartments to keep anything from rubbing on the sides. The girls and Mrs Glum dried the blow up beds and sleeping bags with a combination of the camp drier (until she was chucked out at 5pm) and Bambino's hair drier. It was all very 'Dunkirk spirit'!
In the evening the boys and Marsha took Glumdog for a walk round to the lighthouse and we all went to bed relatively early.
