Tuesday 2nd, Conniston Water

I can see why they call this Conniston Water...it sounds like we're under it with all this rain pounding the caravan. This was the location where Donald Campbell was killed in 1967 attempting to crack the 300mph mark for the world water speed record (http://www.acrossthelake.com/). The glimpses I've had so far show it to be a beautiful place...but for the rest of the time I've been concentrating hard on the thin ribbon of Tarmac winding up and down the hills between very hard and damaging-looking dry stone walls to the campsite.
We took the caravan to a specialist centre in Ulswater yesterday - they were very helpful and pretty unphased by our incident - they fitted a new wheel, changed the tyres using Tyreon safety bands which were helpfully suggested to us by Gom (Frances' father, John) and have been widely recommended to us to hold the tyre in place should this happen again, gave the caravan the once over and said it was fine, and told us not to give up!
Frances spent the day on the phone sorting out all the insurance claims which seems massively complicated. We'll try to get the front repaired before leaving the UK for mainland Europe at the end of August - but realistically that might not be possible. If not, we'll make do with the white gaffer tape I managed to buy yesterday - a bit less unsightly than the black!
We got back to the same spot in the caravan park yesterday and finally got the awning up - so at last we're properly set up!
So, it's raining hard this morning - hopefully it might ease enough to go exploring - Scafell, the Hardnot Pass, Conniston Water itself by boat (perhaps we can hire a sailing dinghy like Swallows and Amazons). We'll stay an extra night here (http://www.caravanclub.co.uk/caravanclubapps/applications/uk%20sites/Site%20Details.aspx?csid=21956) so that we can do some of these things.