Happy 220 birthday!

We left at 9.30 and didn’t arrive at the house in Derbyshire till 4.30. We stopped at Harlow Carr gardens near Harrogate for a walk round and eat our sandwich for 1.5 hours. Not a place we’d go to again - nice enough but not worth over £30 to us.

The journey was sweaty as we had no air con - the windows were open as it was 28 degrees, but that meant horrendous traffic noise on A1. Then when the traffic was at a standstill the heat was too much. Because of the noise Mr C did not hear my navigation instructions (or chose to go another way!) which added to journey time.

Aled and Steve had arrived from Swansea and Carole and David from Ipswich ages before us and had the wine cooling. The house is quite cramped but the weather was no nice we were able to eat outside. It’s great to see them all - the 6 of us have not been together since our Golden Wedding 6 years ago. We’ve had a lovely convivial evening. So nice to laugh together.

Here we have Aled (70), Mr C (80) and Carole (70) with the cake I made. Happy days!