Rest Day in Bainton

Monday and a time to relax a bit after the hectic weekend. The day dawned (yet again) fine and clear - can't complain about the weather.

Our plan was to drive to Flag Fen to see a reconstructed prehistoric village (pretty much the top of Miriam's 'must see' list). Unfortunately, we found out that this closed yesterday until next Summer!!  Luckily we checked first before driving to the other side of Peterborough to be disappointed.

We decided to pop back to Stamford to do some shopping. We also needed breakfast. 'The George' looked like a good prospect so we popped in to see if they could fit us in. No problem, however, it did look a bit posh. Once we got seated I looked at the menu to find that the cooked breakfast was a snip at £22.00 (each). Our dinner for two the previous night (including 2 glasses of wine) only cost us £17.95. What the heck, we are on holiday after all.

The George of Stamford

Replete with a 'Full-English' on board we proceeded to the local Morrison's (one of the UK's big supermarket chains) to supplement our previous supplies so we could have a chicken and salad meal tonight. On our way back to Bainton, we checked out Burghley. This is just outside Stamford and hosts the Burghley Horse Trials. The estate is ENORMOUS and the house very impressive. We are heading back tomorrow to do it properly but we had to get back to Bainton for now.

I had arranged to drive 30 miles down the A1 to visit another of my existing alpaca software users. Miriam decided to stay behind. These guys have over 800 alpacas and even have an IT department! The young lady who is the main user of Alpaca Manager had contacted me with a problem a couple of days ago so I rang her and said I could pop in to help her out. What sort of service is this? The software developer travels 12,000 miles to help solve a problem, unbelievable! In fact, her problem had already been resolved by my suggestion to upgrade to the latest release. I spent about 1 1/2 hours with her and quickly brought her up-to-speed on all sorts of nifty features she didn't know about. I do like to keep my customers happy - and, as usual, I came away with some ideas for futures changes.

Back in Bainton, Miriam had a relaxing afternoon reading the 'Colour Supplements' and entertaining the two dogs and one cat of our hosts. She also polished off most of a bottle of Prosecco (supplied by our hosts).

Quince tree in our courtyard garden

I got back about 4:30pm and we had a relaxing evening drinking the rest of the Prosecco and the bottle of Chardonnay our previous hosts had given us. This Airbnb thing is a pretty good way to travel.

Tonight I managed to see an Iridium Flare, and a pretty good one too. With English skies generally cloudy this was a pleasant surprise. Needless to say, Miriam was happier watching Jamie Oliver on TV rather than coming outside in the cold to see her first northern hemisphere flare!

Tomorrow we move to a village south of Leicester and have three nights in another Airbnb place. Richard III here we come!