Monday, August 03 : Well, I can safely say that the previous night has been the worst that I've spent in a tent. It was raining already when we came back from the pub, but around 1am it had built up to a full size thunderstorm, with torrential rain and everything. The winds were that strong, I had to get out into that mess and retighten the tent's tie-downs, otherwise I guess it would've been blown away. Martin had been sitting all night in the middle of his small tent, wearing his rain gear and holding onto the tent's fibre poles while water was rushing underneath him...
In the morning the wind had eased up a little but it was still raining hard, and all three of us had just one desire: get out of this terrible weather asap!! So we packed our mostly wet stuff, drove back to the pub for a propper breakfast (steaks of course ;-) and hit the A82 direction Glasgow. We had just arrived there when my bike made one hell of a noise, coming from the primary case. I shut her off immediately and we checked for anything that might have caused that noise but couldn't find anything. So I just fired her up again and she ran just fine, noises gone. Just when we wanted to pull off again it came back, and this time I could locate where it was coming from: the starter was engaging by itself while the engine was running, and that was caused by a flodded starter switch... Another thing I found was that my transmission had filled up with water too, building a white emulsion, most likely the cause for the difficult shifting that I'd experienced for a few days already.
So in order to blow the water out of the starter switch we had to open the switch housing, but we just couldn't get the damn screws out. And when we tried to chisel'em out, the housing broke... But at least we could get to the starter switch now and some WD40 fixed the problem. A few tiewraps were used to hold together the broken housing, at a nearby gas station I changed the tranny fluid and one hour later we were back on the road.
From Glasgow we continued on M74 to Carlisle and then on M6 to Penrith. After the experience from last night we didn't even think about looking for a campground, so we found us a B&B again. I hope the landlord didn't peek into our room, because shortly after we'd moved in, we had wet stuff hung out to dry all over the place :-)

Tuesday, August 04 : Next morning the first look out of the window really lifted our spirits again. A tough wind was blowing, but just a few clouds to see and NO RAIN!! So we decided to cruise the Lake District and the Cumbrian Mountains this day, before continuing our travel to the south.
Well, we might have been on the road for maybe 30 minutes when the rain had caught up with us. Back into our rain gears we continued nevertheless, but when the rain and the cold got real bad again we just took the Kirkstone Pass over the mountains, went down to Windermere and Kendal, and headed directly for the M6 motorway...
We continued M6 until we'd passed Liverpool. When the rain stopped again, we went off, heading mostly south-east, and via Buxton, Ashbourne and Derby we finally reached the small town of Rempstone, app. 5 miles north-east of Loughborough.
We looked for a B&B again and found the Nightingale's on Rempstone Main Street, where we were welcomed by it's proprietor Audry Bently and her dog Fred. If anyone comes to Rempstone, the Nightingale's is the place to stay!! Audry is a wonderful host and she really takes good care of her guests. And she serves beer from the tab :-)