Roaming with The Robertsons

Before we headed home, we had time for a stop at another National Trust property. The one we chose was The Children's Country House at Sudbury , where we were both able to enjoy the house and gardens, and also visit their incredible museum of children's toys. There were toys from across the decades and, quite scarily, many toys from our childhood being displayed as parts of history. It was a great way to reconnect with childhood memories at the end of our trip.  Once we had enjoyed the property, we grabbed a bite to eat at The Sudbury Stables . We both chose to have a toastie, Nicole opting for the Goats Cheese toastie and Shannon the Underdog toastie, along with a drink. A word of advice if wanting to visit here, which we would absolutely recommend, is to book a table as when we arrived it was very busy. Once we had enjoyed our lunch, it was time to head home after a very busy and tiring few days to put our feet up! 

Our activity of day 4 was the reason our trip was extended as it turned out that we wouldn't have been able to visit the Heights of Abraham easily on the days we had initially booked for due to the tourist seasons. We got up promptly and headed to the attraction ready for it to open at 10am to make sure we made the most of our day. The Heights of Abraham is accessible via a cable car, which was much scarier than we both anticipated. We managed to visit on a day where it was incredibly foggy, therefore the views on the way up left much to be desired, but once we were at the top and the fog cleared the views were spectacular. We wanted to make sure we had time to do everything available, therefore we headed straight away to The Great Masson Cavern. We were led through the cavern and found out all about the formation of caverns at the Heights of Abraham in an interesting and engaging way. After this, we explored the Long View and Wombles exhibitions before finding ourselves somewhere...

As we had decided to extend our stay for a couple of days beyond our originally intended duration, we managed to have time for a compulsory visit to a zoo - Peak Wildlife Park . This ended up being one of the highlights of our trip. The park was reasonably small and it was possible to explore all the animals within a few hours, but there was a great mixture of animals commonly seen in zoos and those that are more rare. to find Our favourites included the polar bears, arctic foxes, red pandas, and the meerkats (due to them having a deckchair to sit on!). It was also unique in providing a large number of walkthrough experiences, which included the lemurs, penguins, red squirrels (unfortunately we didn't actually see any of these) and the wallaby's. Shannon decided that she wanted to have a go at feeding the wallaby's, so for a couple of pounds we purchased a packet of food which allowed her to get hands on and close up with the animals.  After leaving the Peak Wildlife Park, ...

The second day of our trip took us to two grand houses situated within the Peak District. The first was Chatsworth House , which is well known as the filming location of 'Pemberley' in Pride & Prejudice. It turned out that we were visiting just out of season for some of the main attractions in the area, therefore the actual house was closed to visitors until the last day of our trip. Therefore, we decided to make the most of the free parking to enjoy a morning walk around the estate. We opted to follow a marked route through Stand Woods, which starts from the farmyard and takes you past the Hunting Tower, around Emperor and Swiss Lake and back down through the woods providing views of the side of Chatsworth House. This was a fairly relaxed walk taking approximately 2 hours, and gave us a chance to enjoy the spring sunshine. From here, we visited the gift shop which had a vast array of different gifts (we managed to get ourselves a Jane Austen board game and an escape room!)...

We'd had some time booked off work in March for a while before considering going on holiday. The decision to go away started with an idea of going away for 'just a couple of days' but, thanks to some oversights in our planning, we ended up extending it to a full five days to ensure that we could do everything we wanted to do. Interestingly, we both thought separately about where to go and managed to come up with the same idea of a location - Bakewell! So, our trip to Derbyshire of course had to start there.  We headed towards Bakewell late morning after detouring via St Helen's for an appointment, and made it in perfect time to commence our planned walk with a pit stop halfway for lunch. Shannon had seen a few videos on TikTok of the Monsal trail, which is a very popular walking route in the Peak District constructed on parts of a former railway. It seems that there are many different routes you can take to enjoy the trail, and our started at Bakewell Bridge car park, u...