20240525 Saturday, May 25, 2024 England’s Lake District, Stressful Roads, Rip Off Parking. Time to just sit back with a Pint.

20240525 Saturday, May 25, 2024 England’s Lake District, Stressful Roads, Rip Off Parking.  Time to just sit back with a Pint.

Although our hotel has “first come, first serve” parking for guests, the parking spaces are extremely small and can be very difficult to maneuver into.  Yesterday at 5:30pm there were just 3 spots left and all required extremely skillful parking maneuvers to get into, and even if you got into some, you’d have to do a Houdini escape to get out of the car because there wouldn’t be enough room to open the door.  By 8pm, people were getting really creative in jamming cars into the car park area, blocking in other cars.  Because of this, we were a bit hesitant to take our car out of it’s spot, but because the sights we had planned on seeing in the Lake District all were several miles from the hotel, we would have to drive.  

They did have a decent breakfast with continental items and a full hot breakfast.  We could order anything on the breakfast menu with our room fare’s included breakfast so we had Eggs Benedict, Janet’s with ham and Ben’s with smoked Scottish salmon.  

After finishing breakfast we extracted our car from the car park and headed to our first stop- Skelwith Force, a waterfall on the River Brathay, which feeds Windermere Lake.  It was just 3 miles from the hotel, but a soon as you turned off the Main Streets in town, you ended up on the super narrow twisty unmarked roads with blind corners, dips and climbs.  And when we got to the waterfalls trail head, there was no parking area.  We had to drive about a third of a mile past to find a parking area for trails in the area.  These parking lots are all paid parking monitored by license plate reading robots.  Unfortunately, this parking lot’s card reader was not working so we couldn’t pay for parking without cash, which we didn’t have.  We snapped a picture of the screen saying the transaction could not be completed and then risked our lives walking back to the waterfall trail head.  Ironically, there is no trail between the parking lot and the water fall trail head. You had to walk on the same tiny narrow twisting road with no shoulders dodging traffic from both directions not to get killed.  The water fall was pretty, but difficult to get to because of slippery rocks and irregular terrain.  So we took a few pictures and then risked our lives again getting back to the car on that horrible roadway.  

We then headed to Castle Wray, which is just visible from the waterfront in front of our hotel on a hillside.  You could take a water taxi across the water, and in retrospect, that would have been a lot easier and less stressful.  The road from the waterfall to the castle was just as terrible- one blind corner after the other, constantly dipping and climbing, never knowing if you’d come instantly face to face with another vehicle.  The worst are delivery vans and other commercial traffic which are so wide that even with our passenger side scraping the vegetation and folding our mirror in, there was barely an inch clearance between our driver side and the bumpers of the vans, and if the driver of the van hadn’t folded his mirror in, it would certainly have been smashed off as he passed us. 

 

At one point, Janet thought we had clipped a wall, but fortunately, it was just a pothole.  That castle was just 5 miles from the waterfall, but driving to it took years off our lives.  The parking machine did work at the castle, but you have to buy a minimum of 2 hours of parking, and there are different parking vendors who use different apps or cash.  This one used the Pay to Park App, which we have used many times in the past in the US and Canada.  It worked fine.  But the castle had only the ground floor partially open with a photo exhibition and a kids’ activity room.  We were done with touring what was open for touring in 20 minutes.  The photos were by Beatrix Potters father, so she was in many of the photos as a young woman of privilege.  We took a hike around the castle grounds to get a little exercise and get more of a feel for living in the Lake District.  

Young Beatrix Potter on right

The next stop was a small village called Hawkshead, which features a schoolhouse where William Wordsworth went to school. There also used to be a Beatrix Potter studio in town but that closed permanently and was relocated to the next town south.  The parking lot in Hawkshead had parking, but the parking machines used a different app called the ParkGo app.  It took forever for it to download and install, and even after that, Ben couldn’t get it set up with our UK phone number- it seemed to be insisting on using our US number to text us a confirmation code.  It took Ben about a half hour to finally get the parking paid for- 2 hour minimum charge, using the web site instead of App.  Later in the day, Ben was able to figure out you had to take the UK phone number 07761837238, remove the leading zero and add a +44 to make it +447761837238 in order for the app to accept it as a valid mobile number to use the app.  But the app's keyboard doesn't have any way to enter the "+" so Ben had to type it in a different app, copy and paste it to get the proper format. ARRRGHH.  Once that was figured out, we walked to the Hawkshead Grammar School which is basically just a one room school house with the ground floor preserved as it was in the 1800’s, and a small exhibit room upstairs for a £5 admission fee.  

The town itself is just 2 city blocks with tiny shops and lots of B&B’s.  There was another Grasmere Gingerbread store in Hawkshead, so we bought a small package and had it for lunch/tea.  It was a little like a grahm cracker in form but buttery and spicy.  It was nothing like a ginger snap and a truly unique product.  Since we had 2 hours of parking, but were basically done with the town in 30 minutes, we spent some time hiking through the hills around the churchyard.  Even having done that, we were feeling a bit badgered by the stresses of driving England’s suicide lanes, and parking rip offs.

Slate fencing

Hawkshead denizen

Our original plan was to continue further south along the eastern shoreline of Windermere Lake to a site called Hill Top, a home where Beatrice Potter lived and became a real estate tycoon.  But that would have been more driving through these horrible suicide lanes just to see a rich woman’s house, pay for another 2 hours parking with god knows what troubles, and then have to struggle to get back to the hotel and hope to find parking there again before the parking lot filled up.  So we threw in the towel early and just headed back to the hotel and got into one of the few parking spaces that we could get in and out of the car easily enough and have access to the trunk for loading up tomorrow morning. 

After naps and tea, we walked back past the Roman Fort remains and along one of the rivers at the head of the lake.  It was downstream on the same river where we had seen the waterfalls earlier. 

 

We just had a relaxing stroll and did some people watching on the waterfront out in front of our hotel.  There were lots of international tourists from India and Pakistan on the passenger ferry.  

We had dinner at the hotel, ordering an English specialty "Toad in a Hole" which is sausages baked in a Yorkshire pudding, and a good old fashioned cheeseburger.  The dinner was quite tasty, well prepared and filling portions.  We washed it down with a Red Irish Ale.  

Toad in the Hole

Cheese Burger

Tomorrow we pack out of here and head to Wales but not before paying a visit to at least one Costco in Great Britain.