Lake District 2012

From http://bvhill-walkers.blogspot.com/

The story of this year's return visit to the Lake District started on Thursday when we all made our way to the Glenridding Hotel, Patterdale for our first evening's stay. Ian had travelled down early by train that morning and had already put in a 7 mile warm-up walk (allied to boat trip) prior to the rest of us arriving in the evening.

After a morning's work in Fraserburgh, I drove back to Banchory to pick up Ken and Colin and drive south. Dave was last to arrive, having driven north from Reading - just 2 days after returning from his USA vacation.

A few ales were supped as we anxiously eyed the weather forecast, which, unfortunately, turned out to be pretty accurate for our first walk on Friday - up and over and through the dales to Grasmere. We were past caring, however, when the first team photo of the weekend was taken the night before in the Ramblers:

Sure enough - wet and windy it was on Friday. Not constant, but annoying enough to take most of the fun out of the walk. There were dry spells and these were used mainly for consulting the map:

Not long after this, I took a little bit of a funny turn, as a result of which I decided to miss out on Sharpy's mid-day drams ritual:

The walk down the other side was treacherous. Whoever had laid the stones out on the steep downward trail had done so at an angle - unfortunately downwards, and with them being pretty wet to boot, none of us found it easy - or safe.

We got to Grasmere safely eventually. It had taken us just over 5 hours and we had covered 14 kms, climbing over 2,000 feet and consuming over 1,000 calories each - enough for a 5 pint evening, we all calculated. Here's the stats and the route:

Some excellent LocAles from Hawkshead Brewery were consumed in the Red Lion hotel, where we were staying for the next 2 nights. We took in the nearby Tweedies bar that evening as well and noted that they had live music on Saturday night. The weather forecast for Saturday looked a little better.