my kingdom for an open car park…

Bit of an epic for mid-holiday. The rain came down, the roads got worked on, the ice singularly refused to go away, the Lake District was closed, and so it was that lunch was eaten back at the villa at 4pm after 100 miles and two and a half hours of driving.

Apparently even a flat walk eluded us, the Derwent valley having turned to ice. Keswick even contained some fields that were iced over, sloping fields at that. The car parks that weren’t closed were either iced over or, once we got to Thirlmere, crammed with mountain rescue.

We managed to leave the car for a short period, finding the only spot in a car park half way along the shore of derwent water that wasn’t frozen. Eventually we got down to the shore and looked out over the frozen lake. Low cloud hung over the scene and rain splattered onto the ice making puddles but not doing anything to try and melt it. A couple of decent sized stones thrown high into the air failed to make an impression on the ice.

We left that spot in search of somewhere more promising that might not be frozen up leaving the ducks to their ice skating practice. This proved nigh on impossible and there seemed to be nowhere to stop that might just be a decent place to sit down and eat sandwiches. We ended up driving down the road that runs alongside Thirlmere, and with no obvious places to turn around given that the car parks were packed to bursting with mountain rescue teams – no idea what the emergency was, but as the fell top assessor had not made it to the summit of Helvellyn that day but turned around, then it’s probably reasonable to say anyone attempting to climb up high that day was asking for trouble. We continued along the road which slowly turned more and more snowy heading further into the heart of the lake district but not necessarily where we wanted to be with deteriorating weather and the roads starting to look nasty.

This is not proving a successful trip. Time to turn around and head back.