Co-ordinating things.

Sometimes you can sort out travel exactly. This is what we did the other day. We were meeting friends for lunch at the amazing Stalybridge Station Buffet Bar, renowned for it's delightful decor. We were travelling from Greenfield, a couple of stations before Stalybridge on the Huddersfield to Manchester line. Our friends were travelling in the other direction from Manchester. Astoundingly we managed to find trains that got us all there within one minute of each other. The food, pie and peas for some, vegetable lasagna for others (the latter served surprisingly with jumbo chips!!), was fairly average but nicely presented. 

The following day I tried, in vain, to get my granddaughter and myself to Greenfield at the same time. Once again we were coming from opposite directions on the bus route but the closest we could manage had one or other of us waiting around for fifteen to twenty minutes. In the end my granddaughter's bus came early and she ended up hanging about for almost thirty minutes. So it goes! All this in the interests of getting the teenager's hair restyled, a pre-birthday present, successfully achieved in the end. 

We will celebrate the birthday on Sunday, together with her uncle who shares the birthday with her. We will do so by going to watch the Tour de France make it's way through nearby Holmfirth. There is a parking space booked in a field somewhere near the route and we will walk up from there to see the cyclists whizz by, or possibly, depending on the weather, to see them start to toil up Holm Moss, the local high point. Mind you, if it turns out to be pouring with rain we shall just stay at home and watch it all on television. 

At the moment we are watching Wimbledon on the television, all the spectators looking a little like boiled lobsters in the sunshine, whereas we have warm, drizzly rain here in the north. 

Having been eliminated from the football and the tennis this year, we are hoping to see a little bit of success in the cycling! We shall see!