Last day in the Lake District

Sunday June 20. Woke up a bit tired and knew we didn’t want to do any long hikes today. After breakfast, we decided to drive a bit south, to get to Fell Foot park. This is a park at the very south end of Lake Windermere. Logan felt up to driving again. It’s all very disorienting, but he has stayed in the correct lane and headed into & out of the roundabouts in the correct way.

This drive, however, as soon as we cleared the hills above Bowness, the roads got alarmingly small. Quite often the plants at the side of the road often hitting the back of the side-view mirror on my side. I found myself instinctively leaning into the middle of the car, not that doing so would have helped much if we had hit anything. It wasn’t just that the plants were wapping the car, I could see the rocks & walls that the plants were covering. Fortunately, this drive took only 20 minutes.

We got to the park, didn’t have change for the parking machine so we went down to the gift shop. It was just 11:00 and everything had just opened, so Logan was able to get change.

We walked to the small marina, and there was a tea room next door. Sat at the outside table and had a decent cup of coffee. The marina & buildings were mostly made of stone. There was a beautiful arch between the private dock & the public marina, which got me to wondering how do they build those? This arch comprised 2 rows of stones, side by side. We could see the seam that ran up the inside, in the middle of the arch.

We walked the trails down to the water. There were interesting signs everywhere that said “Toxic algae. Do not enter the water. May cause skin irritation and vomiting. Animals may be affected too.” Yikes! Toxic algae! The signs sure didn’t keep anyone out of the water. There we lots of families who brought blankets, small half-tent looking things as sun shelters, the big picnic basket, kayaks, blow-up rafts. The kids would head right to the water. It looked like a lot of fun. Best of all, no sheep.

Bordering the open grass areas were the biggest rhododendrons I have ever seen in person. They must have been 30 feet tall. We had been seeing big bushes of them throughout the trip, particularly in the woods at the edge of Bowness

After a couple hours at the park, we felt brave enough to head up the other side of Windermere to the town of Hawkshead. The roads were just as narrow, but there was less traffic which made it a bit easier. We got to town, high on a fell and inland enough that you couldn’t see Lake Windermere. We checked out the 3 restaurants and had a pub lunch. Since it was Sunday, they were doing roast beef & Yorkshire pudding so I had to have that. So disappointing. The beef was tough, the gravy not great. The Yorkshire pudding was good, though. I hope to get our household stuff in Germany soon, I have a small roasting pan that should fit in the oven and want to try to make my own.

After lunch we wandered around the buildings, saw the grammar school that Wordsworth attended and a 15th century church. Beautiful stone construction, and perched high over the town. Churches always picked the best spot!

It looked like we could shorten the harrowing trip back to Bowness by taking the car ferry across the lake from just 4 miles south east of Hawkshead. We headed out that way, and the drive wasn’t too scary. We did have to pull way over so a city bus could squeak by in the opposite direction. Fortunately, everyone was driving pretty slowly.

We got into a line for the ferry, waited maybe 20 minutes before we were able to get on. It takes 18 cars at a time, and the trip across the lake is only 5 minutes so the line moves in a big packet, then you wait 10 minutes till you move again. It was a great shortcut. From disembarking, it only took 8 minutes or so to get back to the B&B. We decided we did want to have a walk, and looked at our book of maps. (Logan had bought the Ordinance Survey maps of both Lancaster and Cumbria. Thanks, Ann, for the tip!) In the close-up page of Bowness, it looked like we could walk north from the B&B through neighborhoods, get a footpath into the field, and walk across country for a mile or so to a castle, that was on the adjacent map page. (Remember this bit.)

So we set out, and quickly got to the path after heading uphill quite steeply. Of course. It’s a given. It was very nice to walk the fields again, these were much grassier than the previous day’s walk and not so hazardous with lose rocks. We had walked for about 30 minutes when we came to a branch in the trail that hadn’t been on the map. Oh well, we picked a direction and kept walking. Up, Logan said, “I think we’re coming up behind the hill we were at the other day.” No, can’t be. We started out in the opposite direction. Well, it was. We kept climbing and came into the first sheep field that we had encountered, on Friday. This time we did walk up to the top of the fell. Magnificent view of Windermere. The clouds were starting to thicken to the northeast of us, we had been pretty much ignoring them until we heard a rumble of thunder. OK, time to get off the hill. We headed back across the other side of the field and soon found ourselves on the path we’d taken on Friday.

(These thunderstorms congealed over Yorkshire, dumping what they said was 3 month’s rain in about an hour. Flash flooding resulted, people and animals were trapped on and rescued from roofs, cars and small sheds were carried away, one senior couple was pulled from their car just as it was starting to float, and were carried through the chest-high waters by their rescuers. We saw that on the news. The next day, the headlines were calling for Mr. Blair to get serious about climate control. “Extreme weather” is likely to be a hallmark of global warming, which is taken quite seriously in this part of the world.)

Back in Bowness, we looked at our map book to see how we got so turned around. It finally dawned on us that we had been looking at the blow-up of Bowness, and the blow-up of some entirely different part of the area was on the adjacent page! They were miles apart. In the main section of the maps, adjacent pages are indeed a continuation of the area. Not in the blow-ups. We had a good laugh about that. Oh well, that was our biggest tourist mistake so far. That night we ate at the restaurant on the corner, Messinas. Afterwards, we drove to the Belsfield Hotel to enjoy our last Windermere sunset of the trip.