Kendal and Ambleside

In the morning we went down to the breakfast room and had the most wonderful breakfast. It was a real dining room with big windows showing the river an the bridge. It was lovely and the boys were grinning from ear to ear over the buffet.

We walked to Enterprise, which was just around the corner near the station and rented our car. We got a silver Hyundai i30, which, while not as special and snazzy as the Renault we had in Brighton, is a darn sight smaller and better than the Vauxhall Insignias. We parked it back at the hotel, loaded our bags in it and checked out.

We walked up to the pedestrian shopping streets of Kendal, and went to drugstores and bookstores. In Waterstones we found our first really good bookstore in England, and I bought a few late birthday presents: one of the Wainwright guides ("The Eastern Fells"), "Geology Explained In The Lakes District", and , and Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Tmie to Keep Silence," a book on monasteries. Kate picked up some curriculum for Will, and Galen discovered a new series, Mr. Gum.

I went into a store to top up my mobile, and all the employees had the St. George flag (that "English" flag) painted on their faces. World Cup fever.

A kind of farmer's market was going on in the streets, so we provisioned up with fruit and nuts, and headed for Ambleside. We weren't suppose to get to our cottage until 2:00, so we delayed by stopping in Windermere and poking around in the Co-op and a candy store. (Kate pleased the man in the latter by asking which, of the hundreds of jars of candy he was selling, were the best mints.) Then while Galen and I explored the Lake District Park's visitor centre, Kate and Will discovered Booth's grocery store, hidden in a large building beside the railway station. They bought hte rest of our provisions. I got one of the famous (among hikers) Kendal Mint Cakes: a small, hard, slab of minty sugar. Kind of like a big mint Pez. It's good. If you're in the mood for eating a block of sugar. I'm sure it tastes great on the trail.

Arrived in Ambleside and located our cottage at 4 Park Street. It's a thin slice of a dark stone building, maybe fourteen feet wide, but three floors high. The outer walls, like all of Ambleside, are course on course of massive dark gneisses, slates or shales. They are seemingly built without mortar, but on closer inspection the mortar is just deep within. It's a very attractive architecture. Within, on the second floor (we'd call it the third floor in North America) is the boys' bedroom and the bathroom; on the first floor is our bedroom and a spare room; on the ground floor is the kitchen and living room. It's a vertical life when you have to run up two floors just to use the toilet!

Ambleside is a compact town of narrow winding streets, overhung with trees, built on a gentle hillside. As we walked about we went past outdoor store after outdoor store, separated sometimes by hotels or cafes. There are perhaps more outdoor stores per square mile than anywhere in North America: more than Boulder, Colorado, Jackson, Wyoming, or Canmore, Alberta. It's as if you took the dollar stream that tourists spend in Aspen or Whistler, and magnified it by being just a few hours from, say, New York--but set within the genteel architecture, deciduous trees, and compact spatial layout of a New England town. Ambleside is a bonfire of outdoor spending. Imagine having an entire store dedicated to hiking boots; here, there is more than one. Expecting a big store with every imaginable type of outdoor gear? There are fifteen or twenty, all within a few blocks. Millets, Gaynors, the Edge Of The World, The Climbers Shop, Jack Wolfskin, etc. etc.

We walked up to Stockghyll Force, a waterfall on a creek outside of town. It has however, like most small features around here, almost legendary status among Lakeland Lovers, another consequence of Britain's most popular National Park being scrutinized, surveyed, written about, measured, waxed lyrical over and generally exalted. It was lovely: clear water flowing down over rocky beds through a beech forest. But it was, well, really a minor trickle in the world of waterfalls. It was like an exercise in aesthetics, rather than a blow-me-away natural wonder. Which I suspect is the right attitude to bring to the Lakes. We're not here for the highest mountain or the most massive rock face: we're here for Some Very Nice Stuff.

We walked back down into town and found Wearing's Books: specializing in maps and guides. You can't really take me to towns like Ambleside: it makes me crazy. I coveted the guides to hiking in the High Tatra, the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, and Corsica. I drooled over the many guides to where we were. I recognized that it was my life's mission to hike all of the routes in all of these books. Then my kids finished their ice creams and we moved on.

Home to watch a bit of the World Cup hype (Britain versus the USA tonight), cook dinner and unpack. The World Cup coverage revealed another important British theme: the avoidance of the uncomfortabletruth. The station the boys were watching was full of hype, prepping everyone for the beginning of the game in 30 minutes, showing backgrounders and features on the World Cup, and talking about the line-up for the game. But, when 7:30 came, they switched to rugby coverage. What was going on? Apparently only certain pay channels had the rights to show the actual game. But they had never warned us of this. You were just supposed to know that this channel was never going to show you the game: you had to go to the pub to see it.