Second day in England - off to the Lake District

Friday June 17th. Friday morning we used the workout room at the Glendower hotel. It has been a long time since I’ve done a stairmaster so I took it a bit easy. I did some of my upper body wieghts workout too. Felt good, I really need to find a club in Munich.

We had breakfast at the hotel – great bacon & scrambled eggs and wonderful, not duplicated in the States or Germany, tea. Why can’t people in other parts of the world figure this out? (I once was confronted with tea that was presented as the cup, the tea strainer full of dry leaves positioned over the cup, and a pot of hot water that the waitress poured over the strainer. I was appalled and she said it was how she was taught. No, I said, the tea has got to steep in the hot water! This gourmet farce brought to you in Rochester, NY, at the city’s most high-end B&B.)

We packed up and lugged our suitcases down the stairs, through the fire doors and out into the howling gale. (People must expect gale-force wind there, no one but me seemed surprised.) Took off for the Lake District. We headed back to the M6, and north. Turned off at exit 36, headed for the town of Windermere and our B&B in Bowness-on-Windemere. The roads wound through farm country and it was just beautiful. Each field is separated from the others by hedges or stone walls. Lots of sheep. Steep hills (mountains, really, and they call them ‘fells’) in the background, and the houses that we passed were all made of stone.

We check in to our B&B, The Beechwood at the north end of Bowness-on-Windermere, it was around 1:00. We lugged our suitcases up the 2 flights of stairs (I think people look at Logan & automatically give him the room at the top of the building!) Windermere is a very large lake, 10 miles in length with lots of great nook & cranny coastline, surrounded by fells. We got some stuff put away in the room and then headed in to town to get lunch.

We had lunch at a small sandwich ship/café about ¼ mile into town from the B&B. Here I had my first food surprise, I ordered the cheese & pickle sandwich. Turns out that ‘pickle’ is like a sweetish relish. (They have something similar called ‘chow-chow’ in Pennsylvania.) It was OK, but I wouldn’t knowingly order it again.

After lunch we continued into town, which basically borders the road that runs parallelish to the lake. The road into town is mostly downhill, not super steep but definite. We wandered around and looked at the shops & restaurants, walked down to the marina; all very touristic. We decided we wanted to get out away from town, so we went into the information center at the marina and looked at the walks that one could do from in town. They sell guide books to the walks, and small packets of brochures for individual walks. Within the past couple years, England has enacted a measure that opens up more countryside for walking. You can’t walk through agricultural land, or within 20 feet of a private house or garden, but they have ensured that people can’t close off right-of-way for walkers.

A couple of the viewpoints mentioned were up the fell behind the B&B. SO we got back up there, and continued climbing through the roads at the east side of town until we came to the Biskey Howe viewpoint. Tremendous view up & down the length of Windermere and across to the fells on the other side. It was a pretty short walk, too. So we decided to continue on, after admiring the view and me catching my breath. We walked up a street and turned off onto the marked footpath, walked along through forest and then into the open at the top of a hill after about 20 minutes. This was the Post Knot viewpoint, and part of The Dales footpath. We continued on, coming to a wooden ladder over a rock wall. The sign said that the farmer permitted people to walk in the field, to sight the cairns and use those as guides. So we climbed over the wall, and into our first sheep field, close up. Reality hits pretty fast, the field was dotted with tufts of wool and sheep doots. Lots and lots of sheep doots. There wasn’t a square foot that was not dooted. There was not too much of a smell (unlike a cow field, for example) so we continued up the field and hills for a bit, carefully watching our step. We climbed for a few minutes but I was getting pretty tired. So we retraced our steps, took a bit of a different path when we got in town, and headed back to the B&B to get cleaned up for dinner.

By the time we left the B&B, it was about 7:00. We had dinner at Jacksons, a modern café at the south end of town. Good thing we got in when we did, as the place really started filling up at about 7:45. Had a good meal, and we wandered from there into Hole in T’Wall, a pub that Dickens spent time at. Had one drink and decided to call it a night.

A note about smoking: there didn’t really seem to be too many people doing it. And, Yay to that! ALL the B&B’s we passed said that they were non-smoking establishments. Most of the restaurants we ate in (at an indoor table) were non-smoking inside. There weren’t even too many people smoking in the pub.

The walk back up through town to the B&B was a challenge, my legs were very tired. And then I still had to climb 2 flights to get to the room! It felt great to lay down and the bed was very nice.