After flying overnight from Dulles Airport to Heathrow, we picked up our rental car from Avis and began the drive north. Because we always have difficulty sleeping on an overnight flight to Europe, we decided to stay for a day in Oxford, just an hour north of London. We'd booked a room in a small hotel called The Black Boy, named after a famous horse. We checked in, and slept for about three hours.
Then we took the bus into downtown Oxford, about a 15 minute ride. We'd never visited Oxford before, so spent time wandering among some of the the 43 colleges that make up Oxford University, as well as wandering through shops, bookstores and pubs in the central part of the town.
The next day we drove north for about four hours to reach the Lake District, a National Park with mountains, over a dozen lakes, and two major tourist villages. We settled in Ambleside at Lacet House B&B. Of the many slate-grey stone buildings near us, at least 75% were B&Bs or holiday apartments. We were in Ambleside after the end of the school holidays, but the village was still filled with visitors, many wearing hiking boots and carrying backpacks. The UK's "freedom to roam" laws allow hikers to travel on both public and private lands.
During our October 2023 photography workshop in the Italian Dolomites, we'd made friends with several Brits who lived in or near the Lake District. One of these, Roy White, joined us for our first two days to show us around the area and take us to some of his favorite places.
The lakes in the Lake District are called by many different names such as meers, waters, tarns, and so forth. Our first destination was the beautiful lake of Buttermere. We hiked a trail which went completely around the perimeter of the lake.
On our drive back to Ambleside, we stopped to see the Castlerigg Stone Circle, a prehistoric monument even older than Stonehenge.
The next day started in fog but cleared up as we drove.
We visited a beautiful waterfall called Aire Force ("force" is a local word for waterfall).
Aire Force is near a large lake called Ullswater. We hiked for a while on a path paralleling the lakeshore.
We also walked to a pretty lake called Brothers Water.
On our drive back to Ambleside, we crossed over a high pass called Kirkstone. Fortunately, Roy was driving that day. We discovered on our first driving day that the Kia SUV Avis had given us was quite wide for the narrow lanes in the Lake District. And we mean NARROW, sometimes only a curbless single lane, and lined with stone walls on either side, which made passing cars coming the other direction harrowing to say the least. Plus, we were still re-learning how to drive on the left side of the road.
Before returning to our B&B, we hiked the length of Rydal Water...
...and visited Ambleside's Stock Ghyll Force waterfall (clearly a romantic spot, given all the "love locks").
We took in the sunset from the shores of Lake Windemere, England's largest lake.
The next day, we drove to the western part of the Lake District to the village of Ravenglass.
There we took a 16 mile ride on the narrow gauge Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway. You can see how narrow the gauge was in the photograph below, compared to Jeannette's shoe!
Not dissimilar to riding a kid's toy train!
At the end of the line, the train's engineer manually rotated the engine and attached coal car on a turntable and reconnected it to the cars for the return journey.
Near Ravenglass village we walked to the remains of an ancient Roman bath. Ravenglass was the westernmost end of the Roman occupation from which Hadrian's Wall stretched to Britain's east coast.
Our drive to Ravenglass was hampered by a flat tire on the way. We were able to call Avis for tire service, but it took them about two hours to get a repair van and new tire to us. We suffered a second flat from a slow leak while parked on the street in Ambleside, with a similar two hour wait for repair. Plus, the car's tire pressure monitoring system told us we had a leak in a third tire. We resolved to trade in this lemon for another car at the Glasgow airport as we drove north to Scotland. We also wanted to get something much smaller for the roads we would travel in Scotland, and were successful in trading for a Fiat 500.
On our last day in the Lake District, we cruised in a small launch on Coniston Water.
In the late afternoon we drove an exceptionally narrow and winding road to see Blea Tarn which sits in a valley below the Langdale Pikes mountains.
The next morning we left Ambleside and drove north to Scotland and the Isle of Skye (with a car exchange on the way). That will be coming soon in our next blog post.
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