Back from the North

I am back - we went on a family roadtrip of the North! Now as you can probably work out from my blog title, I am well and truly only really used to the South! In fact I have such poor knowledge of the North, I spent the whole driving time reading the road atlas despite using sat-nav to get about! I got so excited realising where all these places are thatI had heard of and I had never been to! We started off actually gong via the Midlands to see cousins and tested out Heston Blumenthal's 2nd Little Chef in Kettering for breakfast! Very good fodder and set us up well for the car journey to York!

We stayed in a lovely pub with rooms called The Blackwell Ox Inn http://www.blackwelloxinn.co.uk/ at Sutton on the Forest which was really nice! Our room was modern with a good bathroom and Molton Brown and the inn did great food with lovely hospitality. Highly recommended and a pleasant surprise to find a gem! The bathroom was a great size so when we retired to our room to chill and watch TV we were able to hoick the travel cot into the bathroom so as not to disturb Mr T! Poor boy spends most nights in hotels in the bathroom sleeping - cruel parents!

The next day we visited Castle Howard where there is a great adventure playground and grounds to walk around and then into York for a spot of shopping and more importantly cream tea at Betty's! Mr T had a fantastic kids meal with yorkshire sausages!

After 2 nights it was off to Leeds, anther new city to me! We had a fab mid-week deal in the Malmaison which included 3 course dinner so a nice treat! I found Leeds a bit edgy which surprised me as I am used to London but maybe it was after having been in the country for 2 days! Then off to more cousins in Stockport and Mr T got to play with little Tilly his err..2nd cousin ?!?..no idea where it goes with cousins kids etc!

Finally up to Lytham St Anne's to stay with an old friend of mine and her 3 kids. It's always a funny thing coming from London to somewhere further north. My friend has just moved in to her new home - the home for life she says. And it was gorgeous, 5 bed, 3 floors, spacious, airy, complete refurb from roof down - a labour of love. The hardest thing for me is that it is sooo affordable but just in the wrong neck of the world for us. I would love a family home like that and was secretly green with envy but just couldn't live where she lives. So it is all relative and I have to remember the reasons why I am another London Mummy and not elsewhere. Returning home was nice, and exciting.

The scaffolding was up! The loft conversion has begun! It did mean that I had the trauma of noticing that the poles were also in our neighbours property, the boards are obscuring other people's windows and we have a water mark on the ceiling above my bed already but none the less, exciting! Roll on, 8 weeks of grief! Maybe I should have started a building blog and not a mummy blog!

And finally, apologies for not getting back to you if you left comments - I took the lappie but couldn't get online, couldn't even get mobile signal in most places! So all in all, from a technology perspective too, it is nice to be home!