Up really early this morning. The room was really hot, a bit noisy with snoring, fortunately though, nobody reaches Steve levels. I get up at 6:30 and wander around outside and dip my feet in the river. It is pretty cold. I help start breakfast, make a vat of porridge, which seems comically gigantic but ends up being completely devoured in the end.
We have a number of options for the day. Nothing is planned and we will be at the same place for the evening. The "we want to go to the beach for a swim" crowd (proud member of) wins the day and we decide to head for St Bees for the day. But more options, the long way, the short way, over big hills. Oh, Dave and Caroline, lead us, don't force us to make decisions. Anyways, hilly group and less hilly group. I join the hilly longer group and go to prepare my bike and all that for the day.
We assemble, Gary and Aileen are going to go off on their own (hee hee, more on that one later) since they just have folding bikes. Brenda, Dave T, Dave A, Matt, Ian and myself form the hilly group. Everybody else (anybody not involved in things I do ends up lumped hereafter with "them", "doing something else", well, unless it is funny like Gary's adventure today) goes on their route.
On the road, we avoid the rocky path up from the hostel and take the flat path through the park and past the fire station. We head out of town and head south looking for our turnoff. We pass Gary and Aileen on the side of the road, looking at maps or something like that. (Yeah, wait for it, be patient, I'll get there.)
The pace is pretty fast and we make it to lonely country roads. Well, lonely except for the kamikaze tractor driver (woman, we think, looked like long curly hair as she sped off into the distance) who barrels past us, possibly under control but I doubt it. The bouncing trailer she is pulling seems to come awfully close to many of us as she gives us inches of clearance.
We miss our turns twice, once we decide to backtrack and find the correct road and the other time we just keep going. Brenda and Matt are speeding ahead as Dave A and I see the bench. I had been asking about birds, my typical question, umm, what's that bird? It might have been buzzards. But we get rather excited when we realize, that's one of Ray's benches. I believe it was either number 3 or 4 on his top 10 list. It really is a pretty setting and the view is just great.
It overlooks Drummock Water. We take turns sitting on it and taking pictures of each other sitting on it. Brenda must have realized that nobody was behind her anymore and comes back to find us.
We set off again, Brenda and Matt slightly reeled in and head for our planned meet up with the other group near Rowrah. It turns out there is a home and garden center with a cafe in it. You English people are weird. So, we sit in chairs and at tables with large price tags on them. I guess you can try out the furniture before you buy it. But is it is tea stop or a lunch stop? I decide to split the difference and declare it both, sandwich, tea and a bit of cake.
We eat lunch and sit in the sunny patio and then the reports start to come in. So apparently, mere minutes after we saw Gary and Aileen on the road, Gary had managed to lose her. Completely. For the rest of the day. On their anniversary. So yeah, we might never know exactly what happened, we only have a bit of forensic evidence as clues.
Dave T horrifies us with his camera which is haunted by a mysterious ghostly naked man picture. He blames it on something that must have happened when his sister borrowed it, but again, we have no real evidence about this mystery.
Anyways, we have a beach to get to. Brenda changes, again. Now we can go. The part after Rowrah is on an old rail line. I'm not quite sure of the theme of the trail. Apparently all the sculpture and benches and stuff are made out of the old pieces of the line, rails and bridges and stuff. Beyond that, I'm not sure what links them together, like there are old rail tie benches and large sculptures of phoenixes. But there isn't really time to notice because it is a smooth road and slightly downhill and we fly on it.
We go so fast that we overshoot our hoped exit point and end up in the outskirts of Whitehaven instead. So we have to detour back onto the main roads and over a rather steep hill to St Bees. It is a long climb and it is a luggage free day and it isn't so bad. Coming over the other side, it is a fast nice descent into St Bees.
We park on the overlook to the beach and those who are swimming change, or somehow prepare themselves. It was a rocky approach to the beach and I regret not bringing my sandals today, but I was trying to travel light. Ouch ouch, and finally to the sand. Stepping into the ocean, ohh, it is so nice and warm, this is fantastic. Keep walking and oh my, it got cold really fast.
But there is nothing to be done, the pain will only last so long. Some plunge in and the rest never make it past the warm water parts. It is a funny ocean, there are warm and cold pockets. Once you find a warm pocket, it is nice but then they seem to move and you have to go search for another one.
The tide is coming in and the wading group notices that our shoes and towels are in danger of getting wet. Ahh, thanks. It is getting a bit late too and we should start heading back. Dinner needs to be made and all that. A few decide to zip off and catch a train to Maryport (I think) and the rest of us head back the same way we came, meaning up the steep hill. Down in the village, there are loads of matching tents (well, in about 3 different bright colors) lined up on the green. As we climb up the hill, a mysterious unmarked military looking helicopter takes off and patrols back and forth along the valley.
The rail section again, it is nice but this time it is just slightly uphill. Still, we make a pretty fast pace on it and quickly make it to Rowrah again. We stop at the bridge there and wait for the rest of the group to catch up before heading onto the main roads. We don't particularly mess around and decide to take the A road back to Cockermouth, with the option of ducking off onto the smaller roads if it gets too bad. But it is fine. We make a fast pace and Brenda, Matt and I start the beginnings of our little team to fight the wind. We haven't quite gotten the transitions of switching the front position down yet but it works fairly effectively to get back to Cockermouth quickly. 51.15 miles for me today.
Dinner, two different sorts of pasta, I believe, salad, a fair amount of wine. Quite nice. Gary and Aileen are heading off tomorrow to go home, we try to find out what happened today, but it is still a mystery.
Ray entrusts us with the task of locking up at 11 pm so that he can go to bed. We finish dinner and drinks and a grumpy old man comes down to tell us off for being noisy. (Still intrigued by this "ticking off" expression which seem to be the opposite of the Americanism, or at least somebody is ticked off at somebody (annoyed) as opposed to being ticked off by somebody (told off).) And bedtime.
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