Day 7. Annan to Glenridding. 48 miles (rest day!!!)

Bonjour and hello from Glenridding, located on Ullswater in the wonderful Lake District. Wonderful because it's NOT IN SCOTLAND! Garfy and I have decided that (and apologies for those of you of a Scottish persuasion) that North of the border was pretty crap on the whole, although to be fair that opinion was tainted by the incessant rain we've had over the last few days. Oh, and the crappy greasy food and rubbish pubs and the fact that everything is either grey, brown or grey-brown. Anyway, on to today... Today started as yesterday finished: horizontal rain stinging our faces and winter cold wind, in August! It really gets a bit of a grind when you've got to leave a nice warm friendly hotel (Gandhi left very quickly for some reason!) and head out into a miserable cold morning. Anyway, we soon warmed up and were shortly trotting along some very quiet country roads with the wind behind us, which meant the rain was only stinging the backs of our heads. The traffic was virtually non existent and we passed Gretna, got married to each other and crossed the border into England, land of the free and home of the vegetable. Carlisle town centre was pretty small but not unpleasant, and after a minor diversion we headed further South and into the Lake District, only stopping for the first puncture of the trip, courtesy of yours truly, at 444 miles. The countryside really started to change and look just more well, English. None of us have been to this part of the world before and all agree that it is pretty spectacular. We arrived in Greystoke by about 2pm and found this fantastic place called something like the Bike Barn, a drystone building which caters for cyclists doing coast to coast (East/West) or end to end like us, plus your general cyclists through the area. After they took our cold wet gloves and put them on the Aga they served a fantastic pasta with bacon, chilli, garlic and parmesan and we tucked in and got chatting to some other fellas there who were doing coast to coast over the weekend. I thought one of them looked familiar and after finding out they were from Darlington realised that his name was Phil Stanion and we had met before at Sascha and Liz's wedding in the Dominican Republic - small world eh? So we caught up for a bit and after they left we got on our way through the beautiful countryside. By this time the rain started to ease off and the sun came out, which was nice. A few hills, up and down, and by 4pm we had descended to the shores of Ullswater and our fantastic hotel in Glenridding, courtesy of the generosity of Mr Williams - cheers mate. At this point I think I ought to mention the various songs which we've been singng on the tour - a lot of country and western: Coward of the County, 9 to 5 etc, Roxanne by the Police (sung in a very high falsetto voice), a lot of sun/rain based songs (Horse with no name), a few Pogues numbers, a lot of songs our Dads listened to in the 70's, most usually at some point followed by Gandhi's rendition of the theme from Terry and June. Lastly, just wanted to say that we've all decided that for the purposes of our journey that Rob Price is the 4th member of our team; he's either phoned or texted us every day, offering words of encouragement as well as his usual guff of course. So cheers Rob - you're a good man. This has been Darrin Vingoe reporting, verbose as usual, from sunny England, four pints into a five pint night. Over and out. x. Darrin