Through bog, through bush, through break, through briar

Alright, Friday of our trip North (so now we're at May 27th).  Lots of this day was driving, as we needed to get all the way back to London.  We set out early in the morning and drove for a while until we reached some small town that had a Beatrice Potter gallery in it.  Unfortunately, we were told that we had a tour set for 10:30 when the place doesn't even open until 11:00.  So we whiled away a half an hour by going to get hot chocolate from this totally adorable little tea shop, like a not sickening version of Madame Puddifoot's in Harry Potter, steamed windows and cute little kitchen with homemade baked goods and all, and then we reported back to go into the gallery.  It was then that we found out that the gallery isn't ever open on Fridays.  We all cursed our program scheduler, who had scheduled a "tour" for a day that the museum was closed, and took some time to go back and get lunch from the tea shop.  Soup and a large loaf of bread for a little over a pound, which was awesome.

Then we set off again, until we reached Goldsworthy Holme Fell, where we were supposed to go hiking.  There was an Anthony Goldsworthy work along the hike that we went to see.  Anthony Goldsworthy is an artist, sculptor I suppose, that does all of his work in nature.  He'll go somewhere random in the wilderness and build something out of rocks or wood, or he'll shape ice in interesting patterns.  He doesn't do his art to be seen, in fact most of it is destroyed shortly after he finishes it, but just because.  We saw this stone structure he'd created, a stone square with slate panels in on each wall with the slate arranged to make a circle in the middle.

Yeah, those are all individual pieces of slate stacked very carefully.

It was pretty neat and all of us were thinking that this was a great, fun walk.  You know, just the sort of thing that we needed before sitting on a bus for hours on end.  But then we kept going with our walk.  Remember how it had been raining the day before?  Well, there was mud.  A lot of it.  And then there was a bog.  I did alright throughout the walk, didn't get a drop of water in my shoes or on my feet, until we finally reached this part (the path had mostly disappeared by this point) where the only way across to where we needed to go was straight through ankle deep mud and water.  My feet got all wet, and it was pretty awful.  So enjoyable walk, excepting the fact that my shoes and feet were all wet, which really made things rather miserable.

My shoes in my hand as I stand on top of the fell.  I was hoping the wind would help dry them.

Everyone was really upset about the hike (most of all the bus driver because it took so much longer than we had anticipated) but I honestly thought that it was beautiful (because it was) and that wet feet weren't the end of the world.  We drove for a while, stopped at a gas station place that had  a few restaurants for dinner, and kept driving home.  Oh!  And we watched Star Trek on the bus.  The new one you know, which I hadn't actually seen up until this point, so that was good.  That's one checked off my to do list.

Alright, well that's the end of our trip to the North.  The next few posts will be on the more recent things of this past week, which includes a trip to Ireland!  Til then.