Monique and I

We’d got off the plane and grabbed our suitcases of the baggage claim carousel. A nice lady at the information centre told us how to get to the Alamo hire cars. We had to take the Alamo bus from outside the Airport to the hire car station. Once we had got all of our luggage and hand luggage off the bus we took it inside the car hire place and Dad booked us a hire car for three days. The man gave us a big map of England, the keys and told us where our car was. I guess you could say it was fairly large enough. Dad had a look at the map then gave it to Mum so we could drive 5 hours to Kendal; where Monique was staying with her grandparents.

 When we were back in Calgary, mum had previously booked a lodge just outside of Kendal. It was called Pine Lake Resort. To get there wasn’t that hard. We just had to get out of the airport and drive down the free way for a very long time. Just before we went to room we had to go to reception to get our room key. We were all so tired that night, before dinner I had a little sleep. At the reception they had a bar and cafe. Mum and Jayde walked down to the cafe and got some dinner for us all. But straight after that I was asleep.

Off to Kendal

Because I went to sleep so early, I was up very early in the morning and so was everyone else. I thought it was about 8am but it was actually 4:30am. I was very surprised! We all got out of bed and had some toast than watched a movie on the T.V. By the time the movie finished and we’d gotten dressed and ready it was already 9am. Monique’s mum Angela emailed my mum the other day and said that she will call our hotel in the morning some time. The time was 9:30am when she called us; they said that we could come around whenever we wanted to. So with that we left almost straight away into Kendal.

Now we never knew that Kendal would be so hard to get around in. The streets were packed full of people and so busy that you could barely get your car through. Also we couldn’t see the street signs because they were much lower to the ground than Australia’s. But at last we found out how to get there from a person riding his bike next to our car. When we knew how to get there dad drove off in the directions he gave us. Luckily they were correct; we got there in no time at all.

It was all so exciting when I walked through the door. Monique ran up to me and we said hello and hugged. We had so much to talk about; I wanted to know everything that had been happening back in Australia and Monique wanted to know everything about our trip so far. Just simply talking to someone I knew and different to family was fabulous because it gets a tad boring talking to the same people for 3 months straight.

We were staying at Monique’s grandparents place for two nights. I wasn’t too sure what we were going to do for them two days but I was sure that we’ll figure it out. That night wasn’t all that good though. All of the parents made us sleep in Monique’s granddads garage; it was smelly and it had spiders and slugs creeping everywhere! My sister went to sleep very fast but Monique and I were still awake because Monique was petrified of slugs. Together we thought that we should just grab all of the doonas and sleep in the kitchen. We woke Jayde up and moved everything in to the kitchen, when we did move everything we had to walk in heavy rain.

“Good Morning girls, I see you had a pretty uncomfortable sleep” Monique’s granny said waking us up. Everyone had already gotten up and had their breakfast. This morning’s breakfast was eggs toast; I definitely preferred home cooked food than aeroplane food, well… doesn’t everybody? Jayde, Monique and I overheard the parents talking about what we were going to do today. My family was going to the Lakes district while Monique, Monique’s mum Angela and Monique’s Granny Bridget were going to walk around the hills.

Monique screamed WHAT out really loud because she didn’t want us to get spilt up for the day. My mum and Angela heard so they decided that I could go with Monique for the day. Monique’s Granddad, brother Ewan and sister Imogen had gone motorbike riding early in the morning already so they weren’t coming at all. My family went off a bit earlier than we did; we left about 2 hours after them. When we were all ready to go we jumped into the car to go to the Hills. Driving through a very narrow and wonky road didn’t make any of us feel all that good but we were still fine to walk a massive hiking hill.

Once we started walking up the hill there was so many grassy fields full of sheep, goats and extremely bulky cows; the cows stared at you and looked like they wanted to run you down. To get to the other side of part of the hill you needed to cross into a paddock of 5 cows; a mum, a dad and 3 little calves. As soon as Monique’s mum and Granny set foot over the fence the bull stood up tall guarding his baby calves. Monique and I got rather scared at that moment, we didn’t want to walk through the paddock. But after about 10 minutes Monique’s mum basically just came over and dragged us around the edges of the fence because we were taking forever.

We kept walking for a fair while. All of us were very hungry for lunch so we stopped by a field of some sheep and horses. Monique and I walked over to the horses with our sandwiches and ate them by the fence. Monique asked me to take a photo of her by the fence, not realizing that one of the horses came over to her and took her sandwich right out of her had. We just stood there laughing at each other; Monique wandered over to her mum to get another sandwich. We played with the horses for a while then went back down the hill past all the sheep and goats, the family of cows, the bulky cows and all the way down to the car.

On the way back to Monique’s Granny’s house we stopped at Angela’s auntie’s place. She had a gorgeous German shepherd and she was really playful. This was the house that held the family reunion. She had a large field but a small house because it was only her living there. Outside her door were about 70 full bottles of wines and beer left from the reunion; we came here to pick some bottles up and take them back to Bridget’s.

When we got back we had a little surprise in for Jayde, Monique and I. Once again, we were going horse riding for 1 hour. Bridget took us down to the horse riding stables, the lady’s there asked us how much experience we had in the past with horses then got the correct horse for each of us. Some of the horses there we monsters, twice the size of the horses us three got. When we started I spotted that the lady had one of the biggest horses there named Bootsie. Our horses were definitely not as big as Bootsie.

On only some tracks along the way you could canter but we were trotting most of the way. Jayde’s horse was very frantic but Monique’s and my horse were okay. When we did get to canter Monique’s horse galloped; it was all fine though because she does horse riding back at home. All of the horses brought us back to the stables following each other one by one. We lined them up, slid off the saddle and took them to their right stables. Monique’s granny came is and we thanked the all of the lady’s for helping us with the horses.

Back at Monique’s granny’s house was a barbeque; a couple of Monique’s cousins were at her house for about 2 hours. Everyone was eating away the burgers and salad. After we had dinner there was desert, marshmallows on a metal stick toasted by a little outside fire cooker. All of my cooked marshmallows were very gooey but still delicious. Monique and I were very tired so both of us went to sleep in a quiet room. The next morning was when I was leaving to Holland; it was only going to be a 1 hour flight though.