In the last weekend of September (or the first weekend of October, whichever you prefer 😉 ) I went to the Lakes District with Paul. It was a long drive to get there, more than 7 hours!

We stayed in a very cute youth hostel near Coniston. The road to get there was a dirt road! In the morning the (kind of strange) guy who runs the youth hostel made us breakfast – toast with mould, yummy!!! So we decided to get our own breakfast the next day hehe. This is the hostel:

We started walking early, we wanted to climb the Old Man of Coniston (800m). 10 minutes from the hostel (we could still see it!) we got lost, despite GPS, maps and a compass. We sure got great navigation skills 🙂 The confusion was mostly due to Paul not noticing that we had crossed a pretty big river! But since a mountain is kind of hard to overlook, we eventually found the path to the top. It was a nice climb but it was very busy with people who had the same plan. We saw some abandoned copper mines on the way, it reminded me of Alaska. The weather was changing all the time, sunny/cloudy/warm/cold/windy, but no rain so that was good. We spent some time on the top of the mountain, then followed a ridge. The climb down was long and we were quite tired by the time we made it back to the hostel. We had dinner in a pub, it was good and a nice pub, but they didn’t want to serve us dessert! I was disappointed because they had Bailey’s cheesecake on the dessert menu!

Anyway, here are some photos of the hike:

The next day we spent some time along Coniston Water. It was good we didn’t go for a long hike that day, it rained quite a lot! We wanted to walk next to another lake nearby , and got hopelessly lost in all the small roads, but hey we got there eventually and we saw some really nice places on the way 🙂

In the evening we drove towards Blackpool. We hadn’t booked any accommodation for Sunday night since we were not sure where we wanted to go. We passed through Lancaster, decided it looked like a nice town and we tried to find a place to stay. The tourist information was closed on Sundays, and there was no youth hostel. So we tried some B&B;’s, but they were closed. Just when we were leaving, we saw a pub/B&B; that had a room available. We were glad to have found something, but hmm it was an interesting place! The pub was a gay/lesbian friendly place with a dress code, and they had their karaoke night that night… From our room we could hear everything perfectly, it was quite hilarious, but we didn’t get much sleep.

We drove to Morecambe the next day, a small town on the coast. They have an obsession with birds there, it’s full of artwork of birds! Very nice, there was so much to see. We walked along the coast for a long time. Morecambe Bay has big tide differences, there are even walks across the bay.

At night we drove to Blackpool. This place is famous in England. It’s a big sea resort with lots of amusement (roller coasters, arcades, fair rides, etc). In the fall they do Illuminations, which means 5 miles of the road along the coast is lit up with ‘Christmas’ lights. It’s very touristy but I like lights so I enjoyed it. They had a tree with big lights that changed colours all the time, I want one!! :)) We went for a ride in the big wheel, that was nice! Here are some photos:

After that we drove back to Norwich, which took a bit more than 5 hours, we came back exhausted, but it was a great weekend!!