Up North 21-22/6

We’ve headed up north for a couple of days to Grimsby to visit Kirsten’s great aunt, whom we know as Aunty Anne. It was a nice drive up from London on Saturday the 21st, we stopped at a town named Stamford for lunch, sadly it wasn’t the Stamford made famous in the film Hot Fuzz although it did have a lot of charm and some really nice food at the local pub and bakery. Thanks to the mighty GPS we reached our campsite in Tetney (just outside of Grimsby) with the minimum of fuss where we were met by the campsite owner, a nice gentleman who puttered up to our campsite in a classic old Morris Minor van, the ones with wood all around the windows at the back. We were pretty tired on arrival so we made camp at the site for the evening. It is quite small, just half a dozen pitches with limited facilities. We caught up with Aunty Anne and Kirsten’s second cousin Helen and her husband Jason (whom we met in 2000 when we visited) around at Aunty Anne’s for lunch on Sunday. We had a nice lunch enjoying the summer sunshine (amazing for England we realise) in Aunty Anne's lovely back yard. Today we did a bit of shopping for the van, we needed a couple of storage containers and other bits and pieces. We’ve also been learning how to use all the appliences and accessories in the van. We’ve got the fridge going on gas which is good so we can keep everything cool when we camp. I’ve also had the dubious honour of emptying out the Porta-Potti for the first time, thankfully we were able to look up how to do it on the net as we didn’t get any instructions with the van. Delightful. Anyway, I’ll move onto a much more pleasant subject... We went out to dinner at a Cleethorpes (town near Grimsby) institution this evening, the Steele’s Corner House where they serve up some pretty amazing fish and chips. The house special is the jumbo Haddock and chips which yours truly polished off with some delight while Kirsten the lightweight only managed a small portion. Sensational stuff. Tomorrow we are taking the van for an oil and filter change as we have some serious miles ahead, we are hopeful it won’t cost too much. We also need to address the driver’s side windscreen wiper which is a bit rusty and not terribly flash in the performance department but the mechanic said it’s a major job and we’ve not enough time up here before Glasto kicks off. Glasto wins in this instance, we’ll get it sorted out on the road.