A visit to the Lake District

The next person up for the Come Visit Josh and Megan award is my sister, Jennie. In Durham, she spent a few days wandering about, visiting the city's lovely cathedral, tower (on a sunny day!), shops, and coffee houses. She did express the desire to head out for a bit of adventure, though, but as my other sister, Beth, is a bit 'home-bound' in Michigan by the whole four children thing and Josh is deep into end-of-term essays, Jennie and I were on our own.
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We decided to head West to the Lake District in Cumbria with a hired car. It wasn't a long trip, but we had a wonderful time.


We stopped at Raby Castle on the way. It was still closed for the season, but we wandered around it anyway. We decided it was the most castle-y castle we've seen in a long time. We also wandered through the pretty grounds and gaped at the large herds of deer in the deer park while they gaped back at us (if you look closely at the second photo, you'll see which way all those heads are turned).
The Lake District is England's largest national park encompassing England's tallest peak (Scafell Pike) and deepest lake (Wastwater), along with some nice mountains/hills (fells) and a couple dozen pretty lakes (usually called meres or waters). It sounds like it's quite a summer holiday destination (read: unending b&b's and towns full of tourists), but March was not quite high season yet. For one thing, the region gets a lot of rain. A LOT of rain. One village there gets over 20cm (8in) in December alone.

Before heading for the hills, we stopped at William Wordsworth's last home, Rydal Mount. It was a nice place with beautiful gardens, but, goodness, that hill up there was steep. And, goodness, our rental car had no gumption.

We decided to spend the last few hours of daylight heading out into the hills. Apparently, the Lakes are the place for fell walks. They don't call it hiking, like I would, or trekking, like I would perhaps expect, but simply walking. Never mind that you are walking up and down mountains and along ridges, usually in the rain. We knew that people usually began their walks from the towns, but with a cloudy sky and not much time, we thought we'd try the roads. It didn't take long for us to realize why people walked.

The road quickly went down to one lane, while maintaining its two-way status, judging from the number of land rovers we met. Honestly, it was just a swath of pavement between two side-mirror-scraping stone walls. When we met someone, one of the two of us had to carefully back up (slower scraping of the mirrors makes for less gouging I figured out) to a passing spot; then there was lots of breath-holding and near-panic (at least on my part) while we centimetered past each other. Boy, it was fun. Really. It was!

All the sheep herds and stone walls lent the already stunning landscape a bucolic friendliness that kept causing us to involuntarily exclaim, 'it's just so lovely!' (Ha! I can't help but leave that horrible super-cheesy sentence in.) It felt a lot like Vermont, Scotland, and Ireland all rolled up into one. We had just made it over a bit of a pass from a beautiful valley to another beautiful valley...
...when I rolled over a rock-like item (hey, you try driving on narrow, stone-lined roads and judging your width with a left-side drive car). It didn't seem too bad until a cattle guard a few feet later made a noise worth stopping for, and when Jennie got out to check the car, well, this is what she saw:
We kinda chuckled forlornly, then I scared a few sheep running up a hill to try for mobile phone reception and promptly fell in, well, poo while Jennie hauled out the owners manual and the spare tire (thank goodness it was there), and we decided I would walk the mile or so down the hill to the next farm for a phone. It was going to get dark soon, the sky looked threatening, and we didn't have a place to stay that night yet, but being on a hill and having never changed a tire, we thought the AA might be our best bet. Just as I was starting off, a car drove up (the only one we would see the entire ordeal), and an Irish couple spent 15 minutes of their holiday changing our tire. God bless them.
We relaxed that evening, sitting in the same chair that Gordon Ramsay sat in (not why we chose the place) and spending the night at a quaint b&b in the equally quaint Ambleside (I love English city names). After a visit to a bookstore to search for postcards showing our tire episode spot (we found some), we drove north towards Keswick. We succumbed to the shiny brochures Jen had picked up the day before and ended up at the Cumberland Pencil Factory Museum. We were sorely dissapointed that it didn't include a factory tour, but despite the ancient displays and tiny size, we had a pretty good time. Nice pencils. We have a tendency to find museums like that together. A few years ago, we visited the Blue Bunny Ice Cream museum in Lemars, Iowa, another cute museum greatly lacking in factory touring.
We also stopped at an ancient stone circle, Castlerigg. With no one else around and 360 degree views of the surrounding mountains and valleys, it was almost eery and surprisingly worthy of our round about way of getting there.
We ended the tour with the obligatory stop at Hadrian's Wall (windy!!) and arrived back in Durham just as I was getting the hang of our car, which, by the way, was a four door monster compared the Ford Ka I was expecting and almost looking forward to. Ah, Brad and Kimberly, we rented on the wrong day.
And that is the story of our trip to the lovely Lake District. (Again, highly recommended.) I apologize for my long windedness. It simply cannot be cured.