Blueberry Curls: A week in the peaks

We quickly followed our long weekend in the Lakes with a week in the Peaks. I've never really understood why it's called the peak district as it's pretty lacking in peaks really but we had a nice time in generally rolling hillscapes.

It was truly lovely weather (until the last day). We employed our tarp every day as a sunshade rather than a rain cover, and played about with different configurations for the 'little house'. We spent time lazing on the campsite. We did some outdoors stuff and some underground stuff. We barely checked our phones or email or any of that nonsense. We sat around in the evenings listening to Olympics coverage. We only had one day of Marisca poorliness and pretty good sleep all round.

We went on Marisca's first proper bike ride! After lots of riding round this campsite and the previous one, we took ourselves to the Monsal Trail, hired bikes for the grownups and a trailer for Tom, and set off. We had a great time cycling along the old railway line, toot tooting under the bridges, riding through long lit tunnels, and generally having fun. And we're super proud of Marisca - probably a 7 mile ride is a very good job and she absolutely loved it, as you can see.

We had a really great walk on the Roaches. Perfect - quite a short climb up to a nice ridge with enough scrambly rocks to keep everyone interested and enough breeze on a hot day. We had a picnic at the trig point, and a fair number of bilberries on the way, as Tom's purple mouth testifies.

And we had a nice walk, with orienteering, up through the woods on Grin Low. The orienteering was just following the main path and looking out for the posts but it really kept both children interested. The tower at the top was really fun and we had a lovely picnic and played dragons at the top of the hill. Afterwards was a trip into Poole's Cavern which Marisca was really captivated by. Another brilliant day!