I have been up 'them there hills' in the Lake District, on the first stage of the Coast to Coast walk. They were high, cold, covered in snow and some ice and attacked viciously by strong winds. However, the views were fantastic and the feeling of achievement after walking 60 miles is amazing!
We started at St Bees and walked on to Shap via several pubs and Hostels. Our first nght was at Ennerdale Bridge. We ate at a lovely pub there which had a wonderful collection of beautiful old books that you could dip into. The inside cover papers were all different examples of marbled papers, they were lovely! (One day I will get back to doing all these things!) The day was beautiful if a tad windy, but we walked well.
Day two saw us at Seatoller, staying at a Youth Hostel. Again the weather was very kind and by now we were getting to know other small groups who were doing the walk too. As I am such slow walker, they were usually overtaking us! This day was exceptionally long so I was very tired by the time we arrived at the hostel. Day three was another long walk to Grasmere and the weather was rather wet. The next day was a tough uphill climb which ended in a mountain rescue drama. Another walker had managed the two and a half hour climb to the first peak, then he slipped in the peaty soil and broke his leg. This was ironic as the climb was very tough and we had had to cross some very fast streams - slippery stones being an easy thing to slide off! However, he was lucky to have a signal on the mobile phone, The helicopter arrived in 25 minutes and the Mountain Rescue men only took 35 to climb the mountain! They were wonderful, they knew the helicopter would be there, but came to check the rest of the group to see if they needed any help!! After that I treated boggy ground with tremendous respect - which slowed me up even more!!
From there we carried on to Patterdale, spent the night in a pub and met up with the other walkers, so we had a very pleasant evening of talk and good food. A good thing really as the last day's walk was terrifying! The weather decided that it was time to act spitefully, so the wind strength was about 12. On the way up we seemed to be fighting the wind to stay on the paths, then I had an attack of vertigo when the path became narrow and on the edge of a steep drop, at this point I took my glasses off so that I couldn't see the drop, held onto one end of the walking poles which Shirley also held so that we looked like a very nervous human steam engine!! At the top of the highest peak the wind strength was not funny! We couldn't even stand up, so we crouched, savoured the feeling of being buffeted (?)and then got down as quickly as we could.
I think the phrase 'being well ands truly out of my comfort zone' described how I felt!
But it was worth it, that night we stayed at a pub in a tiny village. It had real beer, over 40 different tyes of Scotch to try and excellent cooking. The Mardale Inn at Bampton is to be recommended!! We were so tired that we continued the silly joke idea that one of the walkers had started with:
What do you call a woman on a high peak?
Dot!
It got worse as the evening wore on, but that pub is where we start the next stage of the walk, so more food and drink will be taken there.
That all reads like a rather dull diary, but the feeling of elation when we wrrived at Bampton was incredible! I have never achived anything like that before, so although I was tired I was also rather hyper!!
I will try to put some pickies on, but will post this first!
