Lake District

It's Bank Holiday season and I need regular blogs to keep up with the trips we are taking.  The Easter weekend in Great Britain is four days and we went up to the Lake District (Northwest England) about 5 hours with Brad and Audra.  Audra planned the whole thing and we were along for the ride.  It was awesome.  We were pretty pathetic road trippers making a million and one stops on the relatively short drive and everyone in the car feeling car sick with the super windy roads.  Brad and Jim did a great job mastering the narrow lanes and the wrong side of the road. 

We rented a little (huge in comparison to our flat) two bedroom country house with old country English charm but modern amenities all the way.  One of the greatest parts of the house besides the old stove fireplace and comfy four-post bed was the old latch mechanisms on the windows (haha hard to describe here).  Our house was complete with a white and yellow daffodil garden, views of lambs and really annoying birds that Jim couldn't handle.  It's funny that being in the middle of nowhere had as much background noise as the city, this time squawking and sheep bahs, not buses and sirens. 

We packed in as much as we could including trying to pet a baby lamb (they run away), visited a lighthouse, rented a motorboat and hiked a small mountain.  We were pretty excited that we could rent a motorboat and then we saw what they considered a motorboat, haha, which looked like a little police tug boat if you put a siren on top.  No threat of going to fast on this thing, but fun nonetheless.  Our mountain hike was pretty hilarious because it was us picking a mountain as we were driving a long and deciding that's the one we wanted to climb.  When you think mountain don't think the Rockies but still a respectable climb when you go straight up the side through the sheep grazing areas and go to the summit.  Note that the first time we tried this brilliant idea we got about 5 mins in and got stuck by a creek and the fences of the sheep farm and had to turn around.  Later we found there was a public path that got you past the creek and then we deviated from the path again and went over/through multiple stone fences (some with gates some without) to get to the top.  I accomplished this wearing ballet flats, haha.  Right as we were clearing our last barbed wire/stone fence on the way down the owner of the land drove by the path and was less than happy with us being there and breaking his fence (which we didn't, but previously trespassers probably bent it down a bit).  Luckily no shotguns were involved and we quickly moved on out of there! 

We also had some serious evenings of board game wars (Taboo and Articulate).  We were all highly too competitive for this and major trash talking and being uber nit-picky about the rules occurred.