Day 8 - Hanging around Birkenhead (near Liverpool)

I love this set of pics - they are some of my favourites from the entire trip!

Dion was still not better the next day; in fact, he was worse and then I started to get a glimpse of why it had not been happening accommodation-wise in the Lake District.

Meanwhile, we were getting the MOST wonderful “text” messages from our friends. Maybe they were concerned that we’d get lost in England (impossible)??? I don’t know. I loved David and Victoria’s messages which usually started like this - “Poor D” and of course, Poor D loved being poor D because men do love being taken care of, don’t they?

Anyway, so after showers and breakfast, Shereen and I left Dion sleeping. I told him that we were going to Tesco and that when I returned from buying up the whole pharmacy, he needed to make a decision – stay for another night (S & S kept offering but we didn’t want to intrude) or suck it up and drive to the Lake District. The weather was warm at around 22 degrees Celsius.

Now, Tesco. My word – it was one of those mega-stores. And the accents of the people I was hearing???? You’d swear I was in a foreign country. I had to ask the cashier to repeat herself so I could REALLY focus on her words.

They have this weird system where they won’t sell you more than 2 boxes of tablets. We’re from South Africa where we can buy 4 bottles of Panado if we want, and I do when these things are on special. But not in England.

Dion gave me a whole list of cold and flu medication which I dutifully threw into the basket but the cashier then told me (a couple of times because I couldn’t understand her accent!) that I could only have 2. So Shereen had to buy 2 for me too. Crazy!

I also took the opportunity to buy a couple of notebooks and plastic envelopes. They had the most gorgeous 5-section project notebooks 

Once we got back, D decided that he really was not well enough to drive anywhere that day so we just took it easy. Dion did a lot of sleeping while Steve and Shereen and I chatted while pottering around, reading, computing, doing laundry (do you know how happy I was to do laundry?!!!), eating, etc.

We also phoned our friend, Wendy, in California and it was just LOVELY to talk to her after nearly 7 years.

We then had a delicious supper of chicken, mashed potato and creamed veggies. Took lots of photos, went to pack and then went to bed.

And that was Saturday 10th May.