Day 5 - Ambleside

Okay, this is getting daft. I am in bed already, it is 8:30pm as I start writing this.

Today was the easy/rest day and in fairness it was. 78 miles, all pretty straight forward apart from the last 10 miles or so which were along “The Lakes” and therefore very hilly and quite hard work (see above). And also another minor cock up which we will come back to later.

Ambleside seems lovely, although we’ve only seen it briefly for dinner before retiring home to bed. The back story to staying here seems to be something to do with either Paul’s childhood or when him and Mel were courting. Not sure, we don’t really listen. Anyway, “other Brian” sees this stop off as a bad thing because it adds a lot of extra miles and a lot of added elevation to our journey. I have no idea about these things, so agree with other Brian.

As there’s barely anything to report on the cycling front, let’s instead talk about Maddie (Paul and Mel’s daughter). She has more energy than the lot of us, so we end up spending all of our evenings playing games with her. The games consist of –

Hiding the tomato ketchup sachets in our hand and getting her to guess which hand they are in. She came up with this game and, considering it’s a 50:50 shot, she is dreadful at it. Genuinely terrible.

We teach her new names, this is a good one. It was my favourite until tonight. So far we have successfully taught her to call me “Tall Brian” or “Big Brian” , to call the other Brian “old Brian” and finally tonight she has learnt a new colour. She knows that her Dad’s hair is “grey”.

Finally, tonight we played drawing. I always thought drawing was rubbish. Maddie’s efforts mainly look like a mix of sweetcorn and pink spaghetti. However, between her and the two Brians, we came up with some master pieces tonight. See how proud she is.

This is my favourite - daddy. Zoom in to the top corner. Uncanny.



Oh, I almost forgot, we've lost Brian. He's quite taken with the town and was last seen checking out the company next door, who apparently are hiring...