Tuesday, 24 July 2007

The Lake District

The past weekend was spent on holiday with my friend Christine in the Lake District. The Lake District is situated in North West England and is a popular tourist destination because of its beautiful scenery of lakes and mountains. (Didn't that sound just like a quote from a travel brochure?) Having seen beautiful photographs taken by my friend Sandro when he came back from his trip there, I decided I had to go look for myself and all I can say is – the Lake District is absolutely awesome! One weekend is not enough to take in all the sights, especially if you intend to do some hillwalking (or fellwalking, as it is known here). The map above shows the walks we took, to High Sweden Bridge on Saturday and Wansfell Pike on Sunday. It rained almost the entire day on Saturday, resulting in washed out photos but the climb on Sunday was thankfully in sunnier weather. The third red dot at the bottom of the map is the Ambleside YHA, where we stayed, right next to Lake Windermere. The photos below show Ambleside YHA, Lake Windermere and the view from the top of Wansfell Pike, which at 482 metres isn't high enough to be categorised as a mountain (in the UK, it needs to be 600 metres or higher), but it sure felt like one during the steep climb up! The view at the top is definately worth it, though. Beautiful hills, valleys and lakes. It was a great getaway for the weekend, and I’m already thinking of going back! :)

Friday, 6 July 2007

Summer Rain

Ok, now I understand all the comments people make about English weather. It has been raining every day for so long that I cannot remember the last day it did not rain. This past weekend was Veterans' Day Weekend in Bradford and I was looking forward to it because I wanted to watch the Spitfire plane flypast, but it rained the entire weekend so I did not bother going. I'm guessing the flypast was probably cancelled. It was cancelled due to bad weather during the Haworth 1940s Weekend when it rained then, and the weather this past weekend was much worse. This morning was really windy but there was no rain and I thought to myself - oh good, a day with no rain. But nope, it started raining around lunch time. At least it has stopped now and the sun is out.