The Lakes, Part 3: Bad Timing
On Tuesday morning we went into Kendal for a while; we didn't do much apart from look in shops and take ages finding the entrance to Marks & Spencer in order to get a coffee in their café.
Kendal was mostly unremarkable, but it did have a nice river and we were confounded by a futile attempt to find a shop selling Kendal Mint Cake (it's this sort of sweet minty tablet-like substance), and we went on a wild goose chase looking for what we thought was a shop - it turned out to be a warehouse.
We spent the afternoon in Levens Hall, which was another stately home; it was very interesting to look around and had a lot of grounds to explore; I was particularly interested that they had an old clock that did not have a minute hand, making the time very hard to tell.
This was my favourite picture:
They also had an old steam engine or something called "Bertha", and I started talking about how I used to watch a kids' show called "Bertha" as a kid, and about all I remember was that Bertha was a machine who everyone depended on.
We drove into Grange, hoping the butcher would still be open, even though it was fast approaching 5pm. We drove past it looking for a parking space and we saw it was open with customers inside. Literally five minutes later, we had parked and walked back, to find they were closing for the day and saw a couple of customers being let out - we could not believe our luck. We ended up getting our food in the supermarket, which took longer than it needed to.
We put this experience behind us the next day and spent the morning in the village of Hawkshead; it is very small, with a lot of very quaint shops. I mostly stood outside and waited for the rest of my party as I'm not particularly good at browsing for a while, and then heard all about an incident in a shop where some woman's kid (in a pushchair) threw a colander; the woman who ran the shop came over, inspected the colander and said, "It's cracked and you'll have to pay for it". I know shopkeepers usually make people pay for what they break, but we found it hard to believe that this colander could have been cracked.
I had a pleasant conversation with another guy about his glassblowing business that he runs while I was waiting for everyone else to finish browsing in shops, and then we drove to Hilltop, which is the former home of Beatrix Potter.
I loved her books when I was a kid, with all her tales of Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddle Duck and others, and these stories should be read to all children. We had a very fraught time getting to the place, firstly because we found ourselves confronted by a tractor that was taking up about 80% of the narrow lane, and then we couldn't find anywhere to park; we drove ten minutes out of our way trying to find somewhere to turn, and when we got back we found there was an overflow car park we had missed.
I liked this picture I got of some sheep; about ten seconds later they were all herded away by the farmer.
The village was very nice and full of buildings that inspired moments in Potter's books, and visiting the house was very nice, although it was very small in there and there were a lot of people. We then queued up for the car ferry and drove to Windermere, where we had afternoon tea in Lakeland. We then went back across town to the car, getting annoyed because everyone else seemed to walk in front of us at a snail's pace.
We went into nearby Yakkers in the evening for their curry night, and the food was very tasty; it was a matter of helping ourselves from a buffet bar. I noticed the restaurant area emptied out very early though. When we got home, I insisted on watching The Last Leg on Channel 4.