Beatrix Potter and the Lake District

So I realize now that, even though I have internet in my room, that doesn't guarantee a blog entry. But that means that I've been really active and too tired to write, so...I think it's okay. So when I last left you I believe I was still in Edinburgh, Scotland. I am now in Keswick-silent "w"-England. This is a small town in the Lake District. Before coming to the Lake District we stayed one night on an island off the eastern coast of England called Lindisfarne or Holy Island. I actually didn't know what this island was or where it was until our prof Dr. Ritchie ("DR") told us a little about it. I then realized that it was the very same island that was a focus point of a BBC TV show from the '80s that I had watched and LOVED over the summer. So to make a connection to a place was really a cool experience. The place we stayed in was a Christian B&B of sorts. They didn't require any payment but had a suggested donation. It was a three story house with really narrow staircases and only a couple bathrooms and showers. Two people had to stay in another house they owned down the street because there were so many of us. I had to lug my suitcase all the way to the  top floor. Before heading to bed that night, a group of us walked along the beach of the North Sea and talked and enjoyed ourselves, walking barefoot and skipping stones into the sea. As we walked we noticed that there we a lot of unusual things in the sand that we didn't normally see in the states or the midwest. My friend Allison collected sea glass and I collected bits of broken painted china. We found lots of crabs along the shore, some dead, some alive. There was a steep cliff near the beach on which was a castle and various ruins of previous buildings. We sat up there and watched the sea for a while, the boys even climbed the rock face up to the top. And one detail about this island I have not yet mentioned is that it is connected to the mainland by a causeway, which means that during the day through four o'clock you can get onto and off the island. After that and overnight, the tide comes in and seals off the island. So while we were walking the beach we had taken off our shoes and set them on a bunch of rocks some 30 feet from the sea. Well, about an hour later we came back to that spot and notice that the water had come up about 20 feet in the time that we'd been gone. So we put our shoes back a bit and kept walking in the other direction. When we started back to our shoes from that direction we turned around and noticed that our path was completely obscured and we had to then walk on rocks and seaweed. It was really gross! We got to our shoes and things just in time. The place we stayed at served us home made dinner and breakfast with our stay-it was delicious quiche and toast and cereal and such. Lots of tea too!  In the morning I got up to watch the sun rise. I had to get up at 5:15am and I walked out to the east end of the island near the castle. At the point where I stood, the sea was on my right with a handful of fishing boats in in, and on my left was a stone wall with a field of sleepy sheep on the other side. In front of me lay the island castle. Twas a beautiful sunrise! Almost like the movies, but better :) The picture below of the castle I didn't take but on the path where all people are is where I stood, and the tide was in so there were boats in the water to the right.

The next night we had to leave our suitcases on the coach bus and pack stuff in out backpacks for a night because it was a quarter mile walk to our overnight place from where the coach dropped us off. We stayed at Durham University in Durham Hall I think it was. They had pretty nice dorms and wifi. That was the night before our first journal entries were due so a lot of us stayed up late to finish. After we left Durham and before we came to the Lake District, we climbed Hadrian's Wall, which is a wall the the emperor Hadrian built to keep people out of his land or something like that. It was really steep at points but it was totally worth it when we got to the top and saw the landscape. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera operating for a few days so I personally didn't get any pics of this place but others did and when they upload them I will show you! There's this one my friend Corbin took of me where I'm right out on the edge of a drop and the landscape stretches out behind me. It's pretty epic. There were three hills we climbed, all were led up and down by wet slippery rocks placed as steps. A couple of times I wished that mom hadn't told me her "rock shock" story so many times.

After Hadrian's Wall we arrived in the Lake District and settled down in a Christian center in Keswick (remember the silent "w"!). Also a nice facilities, but when we started to do some wash we discovered that there was only one washer and dryer and that it took two hours to wash and two hours to dry clothes, and even then they weren't dry. So a few people did laundry like this, one person even got up at 4am to finish his. My roommate went to do some and came back and told me she found out that all you had to do was turn the setting to "quick" and off of "cotton" and it only took 35 minutes. HAHA. All those people spent time doing laundry for four hours but all you had to do was program it differently. But I suppose that could have happened to me too, but it didn't. We've been doing lots of hiking and sightseeing while we are in the Lake District. The other day we went to a poet's house named Wordsworth. Not the house, the poet. We hiked up six miles to see Castlerigg, a stonehenge type of ruin that is in Keswick. That was actually really pretty and the hike itself was beautiful. I have some pics in my friends' cameras from that trip too. One day, we went to an outdoors adventures place and went canoeing and did archery. It was heavy rain that day so they gave us waterproofs and Wellies (Wellington rain boots) to wear. I AM SO GLAD THEY DID. I still got soaked to the skin but at least I was relatively warm and some of me was dry. The leaders first taught us how to make a raft out of two canoes tied together with ropes and two wooden boards. We had to come up with a paddle chant to keep in time with each other. Our's was the name of our other professor who's joining us later in the trip. So when we were out in the middle of the lake you could hear us chanting "MARK. BRUCE. MARK. BRUCE. MARK. BRUCE." They then had us do a practice figure eight around two buoys just offshore and then paddle halfway around a nearby island. When we got to the other side they had us do some exercises in teamwork and canoe balancing. They made us rotate 360 degrees around the raft from where we were sitting originally by walking from one end to the other then crawling across the wooden plank (over the water, and the plank was like 4 inches wide) to the other canoe and then the same thing again to get back to our original spot. THEN they had us tie two rafts together (four canoes total) and do the same thing and rotate. After this exercise we played a game of "Canoe Polo" in which it was played with a tennis ball and pretty much like basket ball in canoes and on water. The goals were the two leader's small motor boats. We had to pass the ball between team members and toss it into the goal boat. The fun thing was that we got COMPLETELY competitive and thus completely soaked because we would splash each the opposing team to try and make them lose their concentration or give up the ball. It was actually our professor who initiated this form of competitive spirit and began soaking his students with water with the handy use of his paddle. After my team lost this game (2 to 5) we paddle against the wind back to shore but mid paddle we started to gain ground considerably faster than we had been previously paddling. We then realized that we were being pushed from behind by our leader and his boat. He was also pulling our team mates behind him in their raft. It was an extremely fun activity. After we spit into two groups, one who went and did some more deep water activities, and my group who did orienteering and archery. I didn't like the orienteering very much but I LOVED the archery! I got third place in scores at the end and even hit a balloon on the last round with my arrow. We were so tired that afternoon when we came back that we all kind of pooped out and napped or relaxed and made a communal meal of stir fry. 

Since then we've done a lot of reading, had some class time, and hiked some more. Today I went to Beatrix Potter's house. It was neat but a little anti-climactic. We we met by some women at the door who told us all the rules of the house: your backpacks had to be held in front of you, not on your back or to the side, water bottle had to be removed and left at the door, and there was no photography of any kind inside the house. We ended up leaving our back packs at the door because it was ridiculous to carry them in front of ourselves. They gave us a little slip of paper that had a return number on it and we had to present it to get our back packs back, even though we were the only Americans there and we were the only two who had back packs up front. The  house looked bigger from the outside than it did inside, the rooms were tiny and had lower ceilings than usual. They had some of her original drawings for her books on display which was actually pretty neat. I love Beatrix Potter stories! Especially her drawings, they are adorable! I remembered the video that we had a Grandma's house that had on it a recorded episode of Peter Cottontale and Benjamin Bunny. We also went to see another place that had more of her stuff on display and I bought some postcards to put up on my wall when I get home of her stories. A group of girls and I went to a café called Poppi Red that had attached to it, a boutique type of store that had amazing stuff! Really cute girly/sophisticated/vintage/patterned/rhinestoned and pearled/lacey/vintage/boutique-y/unique stuff all over their walls and on tables and on sewing mannequins and sprawled out everywhere. It looked almost like the bedroom of Penelope in the movie Penelope. It was there that I spied my first real purchase of the trip: an off-white wire-shaped dress jewelry holder. It is shaped just like the necklace mom got for me after I passed my Senior Moves in the Field test and Senior Freestyle but about a foot tall and is beautifully bent so there is swirls and hooks on the dress that are for putting one's jewelry on. Oh! which reminds me, I found my rings that I couldn't f ind before I left in a pocket of my purse a couple days into the trip! They are still with me and I am so happy to have found them again! Anyways, I have been legitimately looking for a wall/desk thing to decoratively hang stuff on since middle school, so it is really cool that I found something in England for just that purpose! The website for the shop is: http://www.poppi-red.co.uk/  Check it out! 

Well, it is almost 2am here and my roommate is sleeping so I'm going to sign off for now, but hopefully I will write again soon. Especially if I've forgotten anything important :) Lots o' hugs!

Thanks for reading!