Oh no my mistake……..

Having said that, it has definitely been a type 2 fun day, taking nearly 9 and a half hours to do 35km/22 miles.

We started in the Boot and Shoe Inn that we had such high hopes for last night. It’s in a quaint location, it looks quaint, it has some distinctive association with Tarzan and yet it managed to underwhelm us completely.

At breakfast we were cheerily asked, “what would you like for breakfast?” This is neither unusual, nor unwelcome, quite the opposite. However, it is quite hard to answer if you haven’t seen a menu first. Without a menu, the options are almost endless: we could have said “avocado on sourdough toast with a sprinkling of Japanese Suridane chilli and a grilled cherry tomato, just until it bursts. This is a go-to favourite at home. I don’t think they would have coped with this request, so instead we said “do you have a menu?”. We weren’t expecting “no” as the answer. So we said, “do you have porridge?” We weren’t expecting “no” as the answer to that question either, so we just said yes to whatever they wanted to bring us after that. As we are in Cumberland this included the famous spiral shaped Cumberland sausage, so not all bad. 

It was GCSE results day yesterday and Mark’s last results of his teaching career were absolutely incredible. Just in his physics classes alone, he got 10 grade 9 scores; more than any of the following subjects achieved across the whole year: Maths, English, Chemistry or Biology. You could argue all sorts of reasons for why this is the case, but the same kids are taking all these classes and the simplest explanation is that Mark is one hell of a physics teacher. Definitely reason to celebrate. However, we couldn’t shake the memory of a shop bought double cheeseburger, with a little paper receptacle of coleslaw and a trendy, but minute basket of skin on fries, for £18 for supper last night and we were looking forward to celebrating better in style today.

So off we went, without any pavement yet again for several hours. This not only causes blisters jumping onto the verge every few minutes, but is also slow going, stopping and waiting for every car to go past.

Eventually we got onto a more interesting path and began to appreciate the Lake District. In Mark’s words, photographing the Lake District after the Scottish Highlands is like photographing your youngest kid after you’ve watched the older ones grow up and taken a million images of them going through all their milestones. The Lake District is beautiful, and it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to kill us quite so effectively as Scotland, but it’s not quite as “wow” as Scottish Highlands, now we’ve seen the Highlands. It’s more low-medium Lands.

Having said that, it was not a terrible day walking through this…..

 

Eventually we got to the biggy though: Kirkstone Pass:

And then “The Struggle” down the other side into Ambleside.

It was all lovely, if not very hard on the knees, until we reached the Waterhead Inn at Ambleside. 

We’ve enjoyed celebrating in style and eating food that has vitamins in it and are not thinking about the 35km tomorrow at all….

Distance – not far enough for the time it has taken us to walk 35km. Loved every minute.