Day 6 Saturday August 22nd. Homeward Bound.
It promises to be another beautiful sunny day. Unfortunately it's homeward bound for us today so we breakfast and pack all our luggage and purchases into the car, with great difficulty and head off.
Our first call was to the large new 'Lakeland' store in Windermere. This shop is modern, very spacious and stylish. The lower floor is devoted to all the Kitchen gadgets you could think off and the upper floor has a comfortable coffee shop. It's reached by a grand sweeping circular staircase with a grand piano playing on the half landing
From a store that started as a small mail order enterprise some years ago this is a fantastic large airy modern store. If you’re a kitchen gadget fan this store is to die for. We all mooch around the store happily for over an hour. There’s far more items on sale here than in the much smaller Peterborough store. Conscious of the lack of space in the car we restrict out purchases to a few small items. Shame. 
The lakeside tourist town of Bowness is our next port of call. Dave and I spend a pleasant three quarters of an hour on a tourist boat ride around the Islands on Lake Windermere. The sun is warn but the breeze on the lake is quite cool. The lake is heaving with boats of all shapes and sizes.
The lakeside tourist town of Bowness is our next port of call. Dave and I spend a pleasant three quarters of an hour on a tourist boat ride around the Islands on Lake Windermere. The sun is warn but the breeze on the lake is quite cool. The lake is heaving with boats of all shapes and sizes.
Nancy and John walk around the little town and it’s heaving with summer tourists. After a late light lunch at ‘Costa’s’, the only franchise chain eating/coffee place we’ve encountered in the area we head off for Kendal where we have been given an address for a wool shop. Kendal is a fair size town on the edge of the Lake District. Mr Tom eventually helps us out with directions to the shop we wanted to visit. It was located down a narrow cobbled street just off the small market place.
I can honestly say I’ve never seen another shop like it! It consisted of two rooms, one behind the other and was stuffed with the untidiest jumble of knitting wool you can ever imagine. Balls of wool are mixed up in the pigeon hole storage on the walls. Balls and bags of wool are heaped untidily on the floor so there is the narrowest of pathway through the shop. The owner appears to have drastically lost her way and direction and was quite unhelpful. There was so much ‘Old Lady’ wool with none of the modern exciting new wools and yarn to be found in the whole store.
Nancy and I decide to try our luck at the Chocolate and Tea shop next door. It’s a very ancient shop. To reach it you climb had a dozen narrow stone stairs set sideways to the outside wall and into the small door of the shop.
I can honestly say I’ve never seen another shop like it! It consisted of two rooms, one behind the other and was stuffed with the untidiest jumble of knitting wool you can ever imagine. Balls of wool are mixed up in the pigeon hole storage on the walls. Balls and bags of wool are heaped untidily on the floor so there is the narrowest of pathway through the shop. The owner appears to have drastically lost her way and direction and was quite unhelpful. There was so much ‘Old Lady’ wool with none of the modern exciting new wools and yarn to be found in the whole store.
Nancy and I decide to try our luck at the Chocolate and Tea shop next door. It’s a very ancient shop. To reach it you climb had a dozen narrow stone stairs set sideways to the outside wall and into the small door of the shop.
This is the main shop and tea shop part of the building but to the see the chocolates they sell you then need to descend down an incredibly narrow circular stone staircase to an windowless airless room with the chocolates on display. Not the best of chocolate shops we’ve seen. There was a much better one in Ambleside.We gave up on the wool quest and headed back home to Cambridgeshire
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