Lake District Day 3

Monday, 9 September 2019

We woke up in this awesome AirBnB well rested and ready for today's hike.  I promised Tim it wouldn't be as long and hard as yesterdays, so I'm hoping that is the case.  Today we hike around Buttermere Lake.  It is supposed to be flat and only 4 miles.  We shall see.

We started the drive and immediately hit some one lane roads.  Some weren't too bad since it had pull-offs if a car was coming the other way.  However, we wound up on this road with a stone wall on one side and no pull-offs.  You would think after driving here for over 3 weeks I would be used to these roads, but I'm not.

We finally made it to Buttermere, a cute village with a farm and a tearoom.

We stopped in the tea room for lunch.  Inside the tea room, the farm next door sells homemade ice cream.  We decided to have that as a reward when we return from the hike, so off we went.  Here are some highlights of the hike around Buttermere Lake:

Toward the end of the hike, we had to go through a tunnel.  It wouldn't have been too bad if the ground in the tunnel hadn't been a giant puddle, but after letting others go first, we mapped out a route that kept our feet mostly dry.

As advertised, the route was pretty flat, however, due to a detour in the beginning to avoid a bridge repair, the hike was 4.77 miles instead of 4 miles.  We definitely deserve the ice cream now (Tim: chocolate; Me: Fig Brittle).

Here is a crazy road we then had to drive on to get to Keswick.  Hopefully no cars come towards me and need to pass.

Wow...I got lucky that the only passing car happened at the top on a turn with a pullout.

In Keswick there is a brewery that was closing in 1.5 hours, so we tried to get there before it closed.  We arrived to town and tried to park, but I couldn't get my credit card to work in the payment machine and we didn't have enough money.  We drove to another parking lot with the same unfortunate outcome.  We finally tried the third parking lot that was on the same street as the brewery, so Tim stayed with the car and I walked to the brewery to get change for the payment machine.  It wound up that the bar in the brewery was closed today, but I could by a t-shirt.  Forget that...now I'm glad the parking machine didn't work because we would have paid £3.30 for nothing.

We then drove up from town to see the Castlerigg stone circle.  Castlerigg is 90 feet across and 5,000 years old with 38 stones.  Pretty cool.

On the way home, we stopped at a store and bought frozen pizza and a bottle of wine.  We returned to the fabulous AirBnB and enjoyed the pizza, wine, and another fire that Tim made in the wood burning stove.

Tomorrow we drive to Scotland.  Woohoo!