orangery

"IS MY" features predominantly in his freshly-two-year-old conversation. "Is my Jones the Steam?" at least had a questioning tone applied this morning after he unwrapped it. It was also "is my funny minion!" but he threw it on the floor and broke the battery compartment door, so it won't be his glowing funny minion until it can be repaired. It was his first trip to Gibside today, where he saw a lady blowing enormous bubbles with a skipping rope, got wet feet stotting about on the grass and scuffed about a bit in the adventure playground bit. He didn't want to sit on the carved wooden owl or wolves, but permitted himself to be put into the wicker bower thing and beside the wicker deer.

As yesterday, in order for all the non-cycling people to be able to travel in a single motor vehicle I got to bike over, using another NCN route one spoke over from the route to Beamish. This one was possibly slightly more scenic and less well-surfaced, but I got to go over two nice viaducts, and also got in free for having arrived by bicycle. When unlocking to go home I noticed that my seat stay rackbolts were missing - there were spares on the bottle cage bosses, but I was intrigued to discover that a photo on one of the viaducts from the morning showed the same problem, implying that the undoing had happened at Beamish yesterday. Unfortunately I would probably be returning to the same rack tomorrow, but would look around a little to see if there was anything more overlooked.