Day 6 Trees and Ferries

Date: Friday 17 September 2010

Area: Lakeland

Distance: 10.3 Miles 16.6K

Start Location: Coniston

OS Sheet: Explorer OL7

Outline: Coniston – Grizdale – Far Sawrey – Windermere

Journey

Friday dawned pretty sunny and fair, we left at about 9:30am for a gently stroll to Windermere. Straight down the road to the Coniston Water follow it around the top and taking the path up through the Forest, two hours later we popped out into the Grizedale Visitors Centre, having seen one cyclist, lots of trees and a couple of fleeting views of hills, unfortunately most of the hills were behind us making fleeting views difficult to spot.

 The visitors centre was impressive, if very empty, the food in the Café was good. We pushed on popping out of the trees now and then, meeting a couple walking, finally arriving at the road down to the ferry to a sign saying Ferry Closed, which rather threw as spanner in the works. Being British we decided to ignore the sign and walked all the way down to the jetty, only to find that the ferry had broken down. We quickly learnt that “they” were fixing the ferry, but it didn’t matter as there was a small launch on Windermere that for £2.40 would carry us to Bowness, saving us a mile or so walk, so we sat and waited and had a pleasant boat trip.

We made our way up to Windermere and the Independent Backpackers Hostel at about 4pm only to find our booking had been lost and we had no beds. So we shot over to the Tourist Information Shop and the chap there did a lot of ringing around for us (Thank You Michael) eventually getting us into a twin room at Denecrest Guest House on Woodland Road, a lovely room, great breakfast, nice people. Distance for the day was 10.3 miles by GPS to the Ferry and about a mile and a half from Bowness.

Today was a pretty much a stress free walk with some nice gentle scenery on the way, not the high hills but a good wind down walk.

In the evening we met up with some friends, who live almost in the Solway Firth, who came down to meet us and do some walking on Saturday and Sunday, had a good meal in an Indian Restaurant and the end of walk a few beers plus in the Queens. No washing or drying got done.