My trip to the land o' Lakes

My trip to the Lake District with Julianna began auspiciously enough--even though we had taken a few extra minutes to wake up before dawn/unpack and repack/eat breakfast on the run, we got to the bus stop outside our house just as a bus going to the rail station pulled up (we didn't even know that line existed!). After cappuccino apiece and a cute "Watch out for lairds!" text from Julianna's mother in the small rail station, we contentedly boarded the train to the North. It takes pretty long to travel up pretty much the entire length of the country, and while Julianna diligently spent much of the 5 1/2 hour trip reading I frittered away the entire time listening to my iPod. Still not sure if I would have missed that little indulgence if I didn't have it, but I sure enjoyed schizophrenically brooding/rocking out to Margot and the Nuclear So & So's, Paolo Nutini, and Weezer as I watched the best of industrial Britain blur past me backwards.

After a quick lunch on a bench where we got off the train in Windermere (with some stolen napkins from the tea room we didn't want to pay the VAT to sit in!), we caught a bus to Hawkshead. Windermere had its own "World of Beatrix Potter" tourist trap, but Julianna had read about a gallery of some of Miss Potter's original drawings in her husband's old office/cottage in this much smaller peripheral town. The bus ride alone felt worthy of being called a tourist attraction, since we had to wind through the "big," hilly town of Ambleside, with its adorable flocks of families playing putt-putt on the town green, and then 20 minutes more of stacked stone walled-in "streets" surrounded by hills dotted with sheep and the occasional cute cottage until we got to Hawkshead. Although it was small, we both really enjoyed the gallery--seeing the original watercolors of Tom Kitten and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle took me right back to my childhood, and Julianna bought a copy of Peter Rabbit in Scots to indulge the inner kid of our Ecossophile (? my word for Scottish folk fanatic) friend David once we got back home. It only took five minutes to cross to the other side of town where William Wordsworth went to primary school, and we could have even seen his original desk but, not wanting to pay the two pounds entry fee, we instead chose to leer around the corners of the building, looking in open windows and doors before we roamed around the church grounds above to get a better view of the town. Hawkshead from above looks like an exaggerated but true combination of maybe 30 old families, their 20 dogs apiece, and the scads of outdoor gear shops they where they all meet each other everyday.

Our bus from Hawkshead to Keswick, the closest town to our first hostel, was late, but we enjoyed people-watching before and beautifully changing weather/scenery during our eventual crawl through the Lake District's "rush hour." Wordsworth himself would have gasped when we drove by a file of five cows, walking one behind the other, up a hill--how often does that happen?!--and I amused myself trying to invent some saccharine lines about the leading chestnut cow that broke into a run on the narrow slope and how he might represent the trials of life. After a brief layover in Ambleside, we took a connecting bus through the heart of the national park to get to Keswick, and the lonely hills looked dazzlingly sinister as the rain clouds descended--looking out the bus windows to the almost vertical slopes next to the road, the mists that hung claustrophobically between peaks around the lakes, and distant forests so dense they almost looked black, I felt dizzy, and I really realized we were out in the wilderness.

We got into Keswick after sunset, and I must say we did a pretty good job of picking our way up the main blocks of shops and pubs to get accounts settled before we found a night's rest at the hostel. Julianna picked up a marvelous raincoat (with one of those Inuit, masklike rain hoods/muzzles!) at an outdoor gear liquidation sale for only 20 pounds, and we didn't have to wait long in one of the warmest-looking inn pubs to be able to dig into the best Cumberland sausages and mash Cumbria could offer. We had smiled as we saw a familiar Virginia Woolf quote about eating well painted over the pub's entry, and we agreed with her after three huge curls apiece of sausage that put our Oxford standby dish at The King's Arms to shame. Another small miracle occurred as the rain stopped right when we began the 2-mile walk to the lakeside YHA Derwentwater--we didn't make it too far after the street lights on the Borrowdale road petered out, but we felt lucky that it didn't take more than a few dry minutes for the taxi we called to carry us up the gravel path to the hostel. The best we knew of our location was that it was a very clean, quiet, stately old house where we quickly passed out, and thus we were pleasantly surprised when we looked outside our door the next morning.

Continued, Nov 1--Julianna and I gasped, she said "Oh my gosh" and I probably said "Holy shit," and a few of our fellow early rising hostelers chuckled goodnaturedly as we looked out at the lake that was right outside our door. We had heard water running on that bit of a nighttime path, but that had only given me more reason to want to call a taxi (to not drown). We charged down the little green hill that separated our really pretty 200-year-old house (with waterfall! it was pretty mini, but still a good selling point) from Derwentwater, and we merrily picked our way over the black rocks of the lakeside path and quacked at the ducks until we decided to wind closer to the road and bleat at the sheep along the pasture path. We met our goal of catching the 10:30 bus from Keswick to Grasmere, but before then we covered about half of the lake shore; we even found the actually pretty short "Friar's Crag," with its mysterious obelisk to John Ruskin set in the middle of a crop of fall trees and if not "one of the three most beautiful views in Europe" then something pretty high up there.

Grasmere struck the best balance between the almost college town-like sprawl of Keswick and the 20 homes and 200 dogs of Hawkshead. Roads from all directions will hit pastures immediately before entering the small town center, and just as green a walk can be had for the 5-10 minutes it takes to canvas the little cluster of old homes, inns, and Wordsworth-themed shops since plenty of trees peek out from behind buildings and line the banks of the river that runs next to the church. We had to hit the church first so that I could fall and weep at the great Romantic's grave. Kidding--no falling and weeping was done, but I almost bought myself a memorial daffodil to be planted in the little garden behind the church. We had heard that Grasmere was religious about its gingerbread, and it proved true when a bewitching smell led us to a cupboard-sized shop adjacent to the church; for 35p apiece we each got a huge piece of Sarah Nelson's wonderful, aromatic gingerbread, which I thought was almost like eating tea.

Continued, Nov 3--Julianna had the brilliant idea to drop our backpacks off at our next hostel, the YHA Butharlyp Howe (Butterlip House to the non-Scottish, I think), and we soon could travel unburdened to Dove Cottage, Wordsworth's house from 1799-1808 (his most fruitful period of writing poetry). We got to the Wordsworth complex, which was almost like its own little village full of shops, museums, and galleries, half an hour before the next guided tour of the cottage, so we had time to look around the Wordsworth Museum first. I really got back into Romantic mode when I saw all the paintings of Wordsworth and his literary friends (sometimes with their likenesses painted into scenes with Christ, a funny/self-righteous aside) and looked at some manuscripts written by the poet himself (compared to his wife's and sister's writing--they took dictations of the poems he composed while walking around the Lakes more often than he sat down to write himself--his writing on a copy of The Prelude looked pretty scratchy :P). I chuckled that all of the big writers of the time had some place in the museum except Shelley, who effectively excluded himself by writing that scathing sonnet To Wordsworth. But of course my favorite artifact in the bit of the museum we saw was a lifemask of John Keats--I now can imagine a face looking over my favorite poems as he wrote them.

Dove Cottage has to have one of the best old house tours I've ever taken. I'm sure it helped that I was thinking of William Wordsworth grinding coffee in the kitchen and storing food in the cold room with the river flowing under it, or of Dorothy sleeping in the canopy bed upstairs fearing rats and spiders would fall on her from the unfinished roof, but I really enjoyed looking at all of the old, homey comforts that I was typically bored with on plantation house field trips as a child ("Look, children, a chamber pot"). Several of the original, most famous portraits of Wordsworth hung in the cottage, and our spunky tour guide pointed out that Wordsworth, "not the most modest person," actually didn't like the youthful portrait of him that's featured in so many textbooks today because it was "too flattering"; an older sketch, beaky nose and all, delighted him because he thought it made him look like a pirate. After the tour, we wound through the little Wordsworth village to a great tea room, where we got our one good rest of the trip eating a slow lunch with tea/sultana (raisin) scones after. I'm sure I bored Julianna a bit as a rhapsodized about the Romantics, but the tale of Shelley's drowned heart always deserves a retelling, right?

(OK, it was the only thing that didn't burn when he was cremated by the sea after having drowned in a [possibly intentional] shipwreck. His friend, who had found him on the beach, gave the heart to Shelley's wife, who carried with her in a silk bag until she died. Now, that's a pretty juicy story!)

A cold rain had blown in while we lunched, but we were prepared--Julianna had bought a new raincoat at an outdoor gear sale in Keswick, and an adorable blue hat from Grasmere was ready to keep my ears warm under my less rugged raincoat, AND we had already bought a walking tour brochure. We set off for a 4-mile hike around Grasmere up the gradually steeper lane in front of Dove Cottage and followed directions like "turn after the row of cottages in the woods" and "cross the street next to the red mailbox" through the hills and to the lake. It really is astounding how well the National Park services keep the paths clean, with black gravel leading the way over the rockier paths and signs and gates directing hikers through private estates. The rain stopped by the time we reached the highest hill on our path, and we could look down at some other hikers' dogs splashing in the silver lake from a dry perch rather close to the clouds/hanging mists. Our collection of quaint English cottages was complete after we took the road back from the lake past sheep, more sheep, and eventually Wordsworth cafe after Wordsworth cafe to stop by the hostel to blow-dry our hair before dinner at the Dove and Olive Branch, a pub in town built in the spirit of the original pub called the Dove, Dove Cottage! (They stopped boozing it up there about 4 years before the Wordsworths turned it into a family home, but I like to think some of the lush lifestyle reappeared when Coleridge would visit. ;D) Not much more to say except that dinner (and dinner company!) was fantastically fun.

We got up super early on Sunday, since 6:30 would feel more like 7:30 to us after the midnight time change (they have daylight savings time here too, except this much further from the equator than the States=no change in morning brightness despite the sudden change to 4:45 p.m. sunsets!). It was drizzling again, but most of the crappiness let up by the time the sun was rising over our walk past the river (which had taken over a field and all but a few feet outside of the small road/someone's house!). Lots of loose sheep hopped around the steep, rocky path toward Helm's Crag, and eventually my old-lady knee made me stop to lean on a fence and commune with them while Julianna looked a little further up. I could still see across the pastures upriver from the lake and through the leaf-carpeted hills to waterfalls so distant they looked like little gray hairs. And then, as I tried to take a picture which of course did no justice to the scenery (damned lack of depth perception!), a slug almost crawled across my hand.

We had breakfast scones in Grasmere and then waited for a bus. We had lunch in the fancy grocery store in Windermere and then waited for a train. It would be useless to describe in detail all the waiting, standing in claustrophobic corridors and walkways, and nervous stealing of reserved seats on the 5 1/2 hour direct train back to Oxford, but it suffices to say that National Rail needs to provide a lot more Sunday trains so that we all don't have to stand pressed up against a touring Irish singer who hasn't showered or changed for three days. However, when we got back to Oxford, the McDonalds on Cornmarket Street never tasted better, and the rows of steeples and turrets on the castle-like colleges didn't look any less majestic. Despite the glories of the Lake District, I'm still pretty astonished that I call Oxford home.