From Lewis to the Lakes, via Livingston

We had a rather busy time in the Easter holidays. 
The boys and I spent the first week at my parent's house on Lewis. We came back home for just a couple of days before we all headed down to Cumbria to spend a week in a holiday cottage with my parents in law and sister in law. One of the reasons for our Cumbrian holiday was to celebrate my in-laws' Golden Wedding Anniversary.
Our trip to my mum and dad's was reasonably quiet, in that we didn't really venture very far. I hadn't taken the car across to the island with us and so we only did things that could be done by walking from the house. Besides, Ally (6) was still getting over his nasty sickness bug and so wasn't quite at his usual energy levels. He had, however, got his appetite back very quickly and spent the whole holidays eating. I think it was his body's way of putting back on all the weight he must have lost!
My brother and his wife and family were also across on holiday at my parents' so it meant that the boys didn't need to be entertained by me much as they had their cousins around to play with!

Back home again, we paid a fun visit to the indoor crazy golf. More to follow about that in another post, but let's just say that yours truly showed them how it's done!

Ally had pocket money saved up and a trip to Toys R Us left him a very happy boy. LEGO Nexo Knights are his current big thing. LEGO has such a wide appeal that his 13 year old brother was eager to help him put it together.

The day we travelled down to Cumbria we went via Durham. Not because it is on the way there, but because my hubs had a meeting there and he tied it in with our journey south since we were kind of heading in that direction. Well. we would have been heading south west to Cumbria and we had to head south east to Durham, but the two places are both a similar distance south so it meant that we could then drive straight across from Durham to Cumbria, if that makes any sense!

Anyway, while dad was at his meeting, the boys and I headed to the centre of Durham, and paid a visit to Durham Cathedral. 

Not only is it a huge old cathedral, more than 1000 years old, but it is also where some of the scenes from the Harry Potter movies were filmed.

AND, they are building a scale model of it in LEGO!

Our Cumbrian holiday, in a beautiful cottage that we had stayed in on a previous holiday about 18 months ago, again with my in laws, involved quite a few more day trips than our Lewis one.

We visited ruined castles...

We had quite a few walks in the rain...

I should point out that in the photo above I was wearing my favourite boots that had a tiny hole in the sole, which on that walk began to let in a LOT of water! So my gentlemanly husband helped me over this rather flooded part of the gardens we were visiting! Later on that day he also took my boots to be resoled and I hunted out a shop that sold wellie boots!

We picnicked in the rain...

Cumbria was very badly affected by flooding at Christmas/New Year, and some shops and businesses are still trying to recover from that. The ground is still very wet all around and it has been a wet Spring so far.

However, we did get some lovely days too, and on one of them we walked a little bit of the Pennine Way...

Ally and David (10) made little wooden cars at a woodworking class...

Fraser (2) washed Auntie Anna's car. Sort of...

I took the youngest two boys to see Peter Rabbit and his friends at the Beatrix Potter exhibition. The last time we visited here was when our older two boys were a similar age to the age they are now.

Fraser fell in love with some baby chickens...

Calum (13), David and Ally did some more woodworking and made swords out of sticks...

We spent a morning playing the hilarious game of Footgolf, which is just as it sounds - golf played with a football instead of clubs, with extra large holes to get the ball in.

And before we headed home again, James (16) left a caricature of us all in the visitors book...