Day 20 - UK

14 April 2011

In the morning we hung around for a couple of hours checking emails, having breakfast and enjoying not being in a car.

Eventually we had to get on our way though and Alex had her hands full with a 9-month old who’d not wanted to sleep that night.

Our main stop for the day was the Peak District. We meandered our way down to the Peak District, starting at Stocksbridge and then driving through Castleton. We dithered about stopping at Castleton as that was the place to go for walks and check out underground caverns but for some reason neither Aaron or I liked the Peak District. 

I can’t tell you what it was but both of us agreed it was just blah and not worth the stop. Perhaps it was because it was very cool and a heavy grey sky hung above us. I’m not sure.

There was a sign pointing to the Chestnut Centre just out from Chapel-en-le-Frith and I suggested we go there. What the hell, we could try some roasted chestnuts right? I figured that would be an very English thing to do. 

And so we arrived at the Chestnut Centre only to discover it was absolutely nothing to do with chestnuts! Instead it was a 50 acre wildlife sanctuary with a focus on others and owls.

I decided that I definitely wanted to have a walk that day and if it involved seeing wildlife then that was all good. We were there a good 90 minutes and would have been longer but half the park was shut off due to it being spring and a number of animals needing to have quiet time due to breeding programmes.

We saw plenty of really cool otters in quite picturesque surroundings and came away with more ideas about things we could do on the farm. Not to do with otters mind, more along the landscaping theme and providing homes for bugs and hedgehogs as part of a permaculture system.

Bug Housing

We left the Chestnut Centre and carried on south through the Peak District. I have to say, the southern end of the Peak District is much more picturesque and we quite enjoyed the scenery. 

We came out the bottom through Ashbourne. We spotted a camping ground as we came in and made a mental note to come back. The petrol light had come on and so we asked the GPS to find the closest one. We managed to get ourselves stuck in a long queue of peak time traffic, eventually extricating ourselves only to find the petrol station was now non-existent. Damn! Aaron asked the GPS to take us to the next one, which it did, except it too was gone. Crap! We tried a 3rd time, finding ourselves several kms out of town and suddenly on a motorway and the GPS saying “You have reached your destination”. What the??!

Aaron managed to get a side road off and we headed back into town. Now we were dangerously low on fuel. I made Aaron pull over and asked for directions. Fortunately one was only ½ a mile away.

When we had a full tank we decided to pop into the supermarket for a couple of things and then head back north to the camping ground. When we got to the camping ground we discovered it was closed for the winter season, due to open tomorrow!

We headed south again and decided we’d camp rough again that night. I was hoping we’d find somewhere close so we could wander back into town the next day, but it was not to be. We spent the next hour going down every country road we could find. We found nothing and so we continued south to a camping ground near Carsington Water. We pulled into the one suggested by the GPS but it was in fact a B&B. We went to a camping ground but it was now after 5, the owners were offsite and the showers were extra. We left and went to the next one. This one looked expensive but this too was closed and they didn’t answer their buzzer.

We were back to looking for a country lane. An hour later we found a truck layby off the side of the motorway at Little Cubley. It had partial tree cover and we were so over looking by then that we both agreed it was the best place.

Across the road was another truck stop with a caravan selling kebabs. We weren’t the slightest bit interested in shopping there but it did provide us some entertainment watching numerous trucks pull over and seeing truckies all standing around having dinner.

The caravan was still churning out the kebabs as we turned the lights off and snuggled into our sleeping bags for the night.

Amazingly, despite the busy road, we both had a really good night’s sleep.