The Lake District

We shall call this part of the tour the holiday Elizabeth Bennett never had. According to the story, Mr Gardiner's company would not allow him enoug time off to explore the Lake country, and they had to content themselves with Derbyshire. While Derbyshire is ceertainly a very pretty county, I think Miss Bennett missed out a bit by not going to the Lake District (although she married Colin Firth, so you know, swings and roundabouts). Sweeping mountains, still clear lakes and enough sheep to invade Australia, The lake country is stunning. Even in the completely miserable weather that we had, you can see why this is just about the tourist capital of the UK.

The buses are nuts though. Cheap, but nuts. We bought some bus passes that would allow us to travel on any bus in the lake district for three days, which was pretty handy. They travelled fairly regularly and the lake district is huge, not something that you could walk through without a tent and a week's rations anyway.

We stayed in Winderemere, near the closest rail station, but most of the lake country is further north. Travelling by bus we usually were in a double-decker bus travelling down tiny laneways, playing chicken with locals and tourists in their cars. Quie often the car had to reverse up the road until it found a turnout spot and the enormous bus somehow breathed in as it squeezed past. We were regularly reminded of the Knight Bus in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  The views are worth it though, if you can stomach the journey. I wouldn't try it in a car though, unless I was armed with the bus timetable to avoid them on these tiny roads. 

Our last day Tom wanted to spend at Hadrian's wall, the ancient Roman wall that once spanned the border of England and Scotland to keep the Picts out of Roman territory. (cue the Peter Combe song) so we caught several buses to Carlisle, the northern most part of the Lake district. Carlisle is a pretty rough city, and the weather was still pretty average. We searched around for ages for the wall untill it became clear that just about none of it remains. After speaking to some guides at carlisle castle we discovered that nearly all of the wall has been destroyed, much of it to build carlisle castle. To view the last remaining parts of the wall we would have needed a car. Grumpy that we had travelled for three hours to a horrible town with no wall, we caught the bus back, then realising that each connection we caught was the last one for the evening. Lucky to say the least! 

We would have loved to have stayed longer and gone hiking, but with the weather it was rather nice to stay warm and dry.