A Day Out for Polar's Birthday

We are having a small bear adventure on Uppie at the moment, but before we went away, we found a lovely new place for small bears to play and explore.

We had all gone out for lunch to celebrate Polar's birthday, going to our favourite local pub for the first time since the nasty virus started attacking humans.  Grizzly - and Hanley - had a very nice pint of beer too!

After lunch, we drove up to the ridge near Mow Cop where we stopped to admire the view across Cheshire to Manchester, Liverpool and all the way to Wales, before driving on to Biddulph.

Instead of going to the National Trust gardens, however, Polar said she would like to visit the Country Park next to them.  She and Grizzly had never been before, even though they had been to the gardens lots of times.

We loved it there!  The path we took led into some beautiful beech woods with a stream running through, which runs a little hydro-electric generator for Biddulph Grange House.  Although it has been modernised, the original one dated back to Victorian times.  Hanley Bear, who loves science, was sad that he couldn't see it, because it is in an underground chamber.

Polar let us run about in the woods and do some climbing, as long as we kept her and Grizzly in sight.  So we followed them through the trees and along a path which climbed up to a big pond.

We got back into the Bear Bag when we saw how far the walk around the lake would be!

The route back to the car from the lake led through a beautiful meadow, full of buttercups.  We decided to ask Polar if we could get out of our bag again, so we could run about among the flowers.

She checked that there were no snappy dogs about, then lifted us out.  From a bear's-eye view, it looked as if there was a golden mist floating over the grass, there were so many buttercups!

Little Endon found a dandelion clock and tried to use it to tell the time.  He blew as hard as he could, then counted the little seeds left.

"It's forty-three o'clock!" he said.

I said you were supposed to count the number of breaths it took to blow all the seeds away to tell the time.

"Ask Grizzly," said Hanley.  "He's got a watch!"

So we asked Grizzly, and he said it was teatime, and we were all going home to have some of Polar's birthday cake - a scrummy Victoria sandwich from the farm shop with buttercream and raspberry jam.

"Yay!" we all cheered, jumping back into our bag.

And it really was a very nice cake!