Taking The Long Way: A Mini Adventure in The Lake District

After Snowdonia, a few days back home with mum and dad, and the purchasing of the water proof trousers, we started off on our next little adventure - to the Lake District.
We didn't have a great start to the road trip because it was raining and we hit a lot of traffic. Fortunately we had stocked up on a meal deal from Sainsbury's that we ate a a services en route.

A dreary start to the day - and traffic

Blue skies appear, and some hills

In the afternoon we arrived in Keswick. We sorted out our parking and found a bathroom, we had a shortage of coins, so that was a bit of a trial. We purchased a scenic postcard for mum and dad to get some change. (We later forgot about this gift and left it in Rosie's glove compartment for a few months)! After everything was organised we set off on our first walk in the hills around Derwent Water.

Checking the route

The start of our walk along a lane from Keswick

Bog factor one.....

Taking a rest and enjoying the views

Heading back down through the bushes

We had nice weather and soon layered down from our rain jackets and the scenery was beautiful. We headed back down towards the lake on a path that was hidden in a field, then we took a shorter route back to the town alongside the lake.

We were in need of a rest after the walk so we drove to Buttermere and our hostel for the night. We encountered our first roads only wide enough for one car, and we encountered a lot of them! Rosie did an excellent job driving. The navigation was not so good! We found Buttermere easily enough but we couldn't find the hostel and spent a while (felt like hours) driving up and down the narrow roads and trying different places. We were getting pretty hungry by now and we had no phone reception and not really any idea where to go. Eventually I remembered that I had loaded the email confirmation from the hostel on my phone and luckily the phone had cached it. We were able to get the postcode of the hostel and put it in the sat-nav and then it was easy!

We checked into the hostel and we had the room to ourselves (another woman was supposed to arrive, but she never did). We walked down the road to the pub for a well needed dinner, then we came back and went to sleep to the sound of the sheep outside our window.