The Knitting Friends in the Park are eight! Happy Birthday to us!

Our birthday treat this year was a day trip to Yorkshire. We were lucky to be given some money by the council so spent it on minibus hire, which meant that none of us had to drive and we could have a relaxing outing.

After a fair amount of research, bearing in mind that the trip was arranged at very short notice, we agreed to make a visit to Brighouse, near Huddersfield. We met at the park at 10.00 and piled into in a very comfortable minibus hired from Viva Minibus Ltd, a local business. I am more than happy to recommend this business: the bus was clean, roomy, easy to get into for (some aren’t!) and the driver, Alan, was friendly, polite and drove very considerately.

We headed for Kershaw’s Garden Centre and Shopping Village in Brighouse. First stop was the Enchanted Wood Café for a coffee, tea and semantics. I blame Krysia M who ordered a toasted tea-cake and was asked if she wants currants in it. Don’t they always come with currants in? Or do the good people in the café spend precious time poking currants into buns on request, with a currant poker? No, the question was asked because on their menu they have teacakes with various savoury fillings and these teacakes are plain bread rolls, known in other parts of the northwest as buns, baps, muffins, oven bottoms, barm cakes or barms. If you know of more, let me know.  It seems that in Lancashire and parts of Yorkshire a bread roll is a teacake (read more on Wiki) and one containing currants and sultanas is a currant teacake- not to be confused with the currant bun!

Travel certainly broadens the mind!

Next stop was Samuel Taylor’s – within the ‘shopping village’, just across the car park from the café. This is a craft shop covering yarn crafts, quilting, card making etc. There might not have been as much yarn as we’d have liked but that’s asking a lot of any establishment; however, some purchases were made.

Then it was off to the garden centre. A tad old-fashioned and a bit cluttered for my taste but there something of interest around every corner and the plants were lovely. Some unusual varieties made their way back to Stockport – the three plants for two was hard to ignore!

I spotted a painted lady on a buddleia:

Even though the number of these beautiful butterflies is the highest this year in a decade, this was my first sighting of one. They make an amazing 7,500 mile round trip from tropical Africa to the Arctic Circle each year travelling at speeds of up to 30mph.

I won’t show all my garden centre purchases but have to share this one, which will keep  me chuckling for a while:

Lunch was back at the café and very good it was too. And then it was time to return home – we aimed to get back for 4pm and were only 5 mins late which is excellent considering there’d been an incident on the M62 and traffic was slow.

All in all a lovely day, though a bit too hot as Friday’s temperature ramped up in readiness for the hottest bank holiday week-end ever. But at least it wasn’t raining.

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