Lake District Weekend Trip

First of all, I want to thank Kash Bhattacharya on the VisitBritain Super Blog for writing a very informative blog post about his budget weekend break in the Lake District. It’s exactly the sort of thing you want to read if you are planning a trip, a complete (and doable) itinerary with useful details, prices and personal recommendations. (It’s exactly the sort of blog post I’m too lazy to write.) I pretty much took his trip and copied it.

I’ll make an exception today and try to make this post more travel-guide-bookish.

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On Saturday morning at 8.30 am, we took a train from London Euston to Oxenholme, then transferred onto a train to Windermere, then a short bus ride to Waterhead. Virgin Trains had a weekend promotion which meant the first-class tickets were cheaper than standard class (£58 return London-Oxenholme). I wasn’t going to complain. While booking my train tickets, I also bought the Plusbus tickets which give you unlimited bus travel around lake Windermere for £1.50 for a day. Works out much cheaper than buying the bus tickets later. The cool thing in the lake district is that even the normal buses are open-top.

At Euston, we briefly visited the first-class lounge: free coffee, tea, soft drinks, biscuits … chairs, tables, orchids and nice-smelling soap in the bathrooms. Nice, but nothing overly special. First-class train isn’t too different from standard class, except you get free soft drinks, crisps and biscuits. Also, free wi-fi.  Few phrases make me as happy as "free wifi" unless it's "open bar," the Compulsive Confessor recently tweeted. I couldn’t agree more.

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We stayed at YHA Ambleside, which is actually not in Ambleside but in Waterhead, right on the shore of Lake Winderemere. The location is AWESOME. I’m not really a hostel person, but they have private rooms here too, which are small but clean. (It worked out at £51.90/night for a twin room with breakfast.) Facilities are not bad if you’re backpacking. There’s a good self-catering kitchen and adjacent dining room, an awesome restaurant (good value too), lots of tables outside for you to enjoy the sunshine, canoe and kayak hire … but they charge £8 for 24 hours of wifi access which is just evilstupidiotic in this day and age. Shouldn’t be legal! The EU should intervene! Another slight grumble about the YHA is that they won’t check you in until 2pm but you have to check out by 10am. Four hours to clean the five-square metre room? Seriously?

Waterhead is a great place to base yourself. We managed to stumble upon the All England Open Skimming Championships 2011. First I thought it was some joke, but apparently no, this is an annual event. They seemed to take it all very seriously, in the way that only English people can.

In the afternoon, we took a 3-mile walk around Ambleside, which took us up to Jenkyn’s Crag for some great views of the lake. The shops in the Lake District sell these cool postcards with maps of walks you can do, and directions on the back side. I don’t like carrying heavy guidebooks with maps around with me, so this is a brilliant idea.

Wouldn’t you just want to sit on this bench and compose some poetry? I’m not surprised the writers used to like the Lake District so much.

In the evening, we spent a lot of time just chilling out on the piers, soaking up the glorious sunshine.

Also in Waterhead, we discovered this pet shop that sold really cool souvenirs. “If my dog doesn’t like you, I probably won’t either.”

On Sunday, we made a “pilgrimage” to Hill Top where Beatrix Potter used to live. There are several ways to get there, most of which involve dishing out quite a bit of money. We planned to take a bus to Bowness, then boat across the lake and afterwards minibus to Hill Top. But plans never quite work out how you expect, and after leaving the hostel at 9.30 am, we found out the first bus out of Ambleside didn’t leave for another hour. So we walked to Windermere (3 miles), then on to Bowness (1.5 miles) and then the nice lady in tourist information told us we can go across the lake with the tourist boat (£9.20 return including minibus to Hill Top) or we can take the car ferry for 50p a little further down the road. After the ferry ride, it’s another 2.5 miles to Hill Top. We were warned it’s a “steep hill”, but really if you’re fit enough to walk up a few flights of stairs then you can easily do it. It’s actually an absolutely beautiful walk and you get to see so much of the countryside and animals that would have inspired Beatrix Potter. Much better than sitting on a stuffy minibus!

Hill Top itself is a nice cottage with a very pretty, traditional English country garden. It’s £7 to enter. The house is kept pretty much exactly how it used to be when Beatrix lived there. Apparently her wish was to leave it “as if she had just popped out to post a letter” rather than making it into a museum. Btw. this is NOT the house they used in the Miss Potter movie. The movie was filmed at Yew Tree Farm in nearby Coniston.

After all that walking, we treated ourselves to a rest and some food at nearby Sawrey House. I had cream tea, and my sister ordered their soup of the day.

We ate and watched this little girl doing cartwheels. Why is it that you can do cartwheels when you’re a kid but then you grow up and suddenly you can’t do them anymore? Because you’re just too scared of falling on your face?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go back to those beginnings, to be fearless and try mad things again without the fear of failure, the fear of breaking your bones? To forgive ourselves when we fall and to try again and again until those cartwheels are beautiful?

On Sunday afternoon we were treated to some aerobatic antics by the Red Arrows. They were just flying around over the lake, doing their cartwheels in the sky.

And then it was time for our train back to London. We took the local train at 7pm from Windermere to Oxenholme and then transferred onto a 7.29pm Virgin train to London. I didn’t want to leave!!! We could have stayed in Ambleside much longer, as there are plenty of other things to do. But hey, weekend is better than nothing too.

Other things we would have liked to do if there was more time:
- Grasmere – visit to Dove Cottage where William Wordsworth used to live
- visit to Lake Coniston, and Yew Tree Farm where the Miss Potter movie was filmed
- take a ride on the steam train

I’ll have to come back some other time!