The holiday with more 'excitement' than we expected

 We were away again this week with the caravan, this time up to a gorgeous campsite outside Buxton - hidden away in an old quarry right next to a country park. The journey up went fine.

Unfortunately, this is how we made the return journey:

It seems to be an unfortunate holiday tradition for the car to go wrong while we're away - it happened three times last year and this holiday the clutch started playing up during the week. By Thursday afternoon, the car decided that we didn't really need reverse gear.  DH was freaking out but managed to nurse the car (forwards) home to the campsite where we called out the AA (again.  We're certainly getting our money's worth out of our AA membership).  With just a few attempts at changing gears, the engineer pronounced the clutch to be deceased and that the car wasn't going anywhere.  He arranged the recovery truck for the last day of our holiday, Saturday, which meant that we were stranded for the remainder of the week.  Luckily the campsite is within a reasonable walking distance of Buxton so we wandered down there again on Friday and mooched about and had a couple of leisurely meals, before returning to do a full pack up on Friday night. The truck arrival was scheduled for a two hour window 8am to 10am, so we had to get up at 7am and finish getting the unit ready for towing (all the services disconnected etc.).  Also poor DH had to climb up the hill from the quarry to get a mobile signal to get their updates, so since they didn't actually come until 11am, he was stuck up in the windy grassland for three hours with sheep for company.  It was a long trip back because we had to detour to drop the caravan off to the storage yard, and en route the driver had to take a mandatory 15 minute break and subsequently a mandatory 45 minute break at a services due to the amount of driving time.  Then when we finally dropped the car at the dealer's at 4pm on Saturday, we had to make several trips back and forth to the house on foot to transport our belongings that were in the car.  Needless to say we were pretty exhausted by the end of it all. The dealer said there were no courtesy cars available so I had to call the head office and express my displeasure about being sold a lemon and being carless for possibly some weeks until they can fix the car under warranty. So now we are getting a courtesy car sometime this week. But it won't have a tow hitch, so no more caravan holidays until we get our own car back.

Meanwhile, as all of this personal drama was playing out, the BBC were filming a camping episode for a new series right next to our unit. So while we were packing up, and waiting around, there were about six vans, several cameramen, sound engineers, three 'celebrities' (I've never heard of them) pretending to camp in tents, and loads of filming going on right next to us.  They did a 'talking head' interview with the lead celebrity Mark Wright virtually outside my caravan window, which has now completely disillusioned me for watching any kind of reality TV even ones like the Sewing Bee where people are apparently revealing their innermost hearts on camera.  Because the producer was completely feeding him all the content while the cameraman filmed Mark in close up.  Producer: "so Mark, tell us about what it's like for you and your Dad to be here, when you're not really outdoorsy people, it must feel strange fish out of water?"  and Mark would bellow out in his blokey voice  to camera, "It's really something different for my Dad and I to be here. I have to say we're not really the outdoors types, so it's a bit of a fish out of water experience for us, but hey it's been great". and so on line by line.  I was impressed with Mark's memory and ability to parrot back the messaging anyway.  Luckily it was quite a windy and rainy night, as we were afraid that all the celebrities and crew were going to be guffawing around the firepit into the night but they were huddled in their little pop up tents instead.  When our recovery truck arrived Saturday morning, they had to pause filming and also clear some room so the truck could get turned around to be able to load our car.

Oh, and on our first full day, DH managed to crack a tooth while chewing on a toffee, so he had to eat on one size of his mouth all week while increasingly larger bits of filling fell out.  So he's off to the dentist on Tuesday which is going to cost a fortune because he's joining my dentist who is no longer accepting NHS patients.

Apart from all that (!) we did actually have a nice holiday.  We had a couple of really nice walks near the Peak District National Park, and explored the historic towns of Buxton and Bakewell.  We found some good secondhand bookshops, ate lots of good meals, and relaxed in the hot late afternoons in our awning as it was much cooler up in the quarry than down in the towns.  There were still lots of Jubilee decorations up, including some yarn bombing.

And it was the right time of year for the historic custom of Well Dressing, which I think is only still a tradition in Derbyshire and Staffordshire.  These days the dressing is mostly applied directly to large plaques covered in clay, with incredibly intricate designs created by sticking on a variety of natural materials such as lichen, stones, seeds, flower petals, greenery, moss and even yarn or wool.  This week we were able to see examples of well dressing in Tideswell, Upper Haddon and Litton.  The Upper Haddon example was spectactular.

Other highlights of the week were a tour through Poole's Caverns (a large underground cave near the campsite) and a visit to the ancient fortified manor house of Haddon Hall.

I worked on a few crafts  while we were relaxing at the caravan.  I finished the stamped embroidered tea towel that I bought in Paducah, and it looks very nice in the van although I wasn't able to iron it yet after rinsing out the embroidery lines at the campsite.

I was also doing some more knitting on the Aldi boucle mint green t-shirt because I had to pull all the previous knitting out and start over again.  When I seamed the original pieces together, it turned out to be absolutely huge on me.  Obviously a total fail on the tension sample.  I'm reknitting using the measurements for two sizes smaller which hopefully is going to be right this time. At least it gave me something to do during the drive up to Buxton: I was unravelling all the knitting and balling the yarn up again.

I took along the two books on needle tatting for beginners that I bought at the Makit fair a while back, and my tatting needles, and started working through some of the beginning samples. I'm finding it hard to achieve consistent spacing and picot lengths so far.

A while ago, I think when I retired, a friend gave me a little cross stitch bookmark kit.  I did start it, but became quickly fed up with the very floppy canvas which made it virtually impossible to achieve neat stitches, plus the narrow shape was hard to hold in the hand.  After spotting a custom frame online that someone's husband had knocked up for stitching bookmarks, I improvised something similar using a bit of scrap wood. so I was stitching on that during the holiday as well and it's going much better now.

I did a bit of shopping.   I found an older secondhand book by Janet Granger, a superb stitcher whose blog I look at occasionally. And in another bookstore, I was astonished to see a modern book on netting lace, and it was remaindered for less than £5 so that came home with me.  I have some netted doilies in my vintage textile collection but I didn't know anyone was still doing this craft.  I'll have to look into getting some tools and having a go (because I need another hobby....)

When we visited Tideswell to see their well dressing, completely by chance we parked very near the fine shop of Peak District Yarns. They weren't even open, but as I peered disconsolately through the window, the owner spotted me and came to let me in quite happily. She dyes most of the yarn herself on the premises, and also runs subscription clubs such as the intriguingly named 'Socks and Chocs'.  She was so friendly so of course I really had to buy something, didn't I?

 I was able to find three treasures at an antiques store in Bakewell - that is to say, I bought three treasures, there were probably another 10 things I would have happily taken home also.  This is a little thread spool, not sure whether it is bone, ivory or bakelite.  And a Tunbridge ware needlebook, and a gorgeous little Victorian pincushion described as Mauchline Ware but I'm not sure as it is polychrome and those were normally black and white.

As the 'icing on the cake' fpr this week of adventure, when we got home I found that my computer refused to boot up. I'd been getting warnings of imminent drive failure on my SSD drive, and had even ordered a replacement drive. But I didn't have time to fit it before we left, and the computer was still grudgingly booting up before we left...  So I've spent literally 8 hours today working on the PC in between watching Youtube videos on my phone looking for solutions to try.  Thanks to the university of Youtube, I managed to create an Install Media flash drive using DH's laptop, hook up the replacement SSD drive, re-install a new copy of Windows 10 and boot the machine off the new drive, and then spent some hours trying various solutions to access the kaput drive but no luck. In the end I've just taken the broken drive out completely and fitted the new drive in its place.  Then I spent a few more hours trying to remember what operating software was on the kaput drive and looking for replacements.  Surprisingly my 2016 download link for Office worked again, so I was able to download that suite.  My OneNote files were in the cloud (the only cloud storage I use as I don't like my data floating around). So far the computer refuses to connect to my admittedly very old printer which is too old to have a Windows 10 compatible driver - yet it was happily using the printer prior to the breakdown so I will have to keep working on that one. I've got one more thing to try on the kaput drive: I've ordered a SSD-to-USB converter cable off Amazon which apparently in some cases will let the data be accessed. We'll see.  Luckily the vast majority of my personal data was kept on the other larger drive.

So hopefully the coming week will be calm with no more mishaps.  There's certainly a lot of gardening to be done, it all went a bit to heck while we were away.