The Lake District - Part 1

Two weekends ago (just before school started for the kids), we had a short vacation in the Lake District of England. The Lake District is less than 2 hours North-East of here. Ethan, having spent a good part of his life growing up on Keuka Lake in NY, has been very anxious to see what this region was like. So, we thought a trip to the Lake District would make a good final vacation before school started and the baby came.

We were able to find a cottage to rent for the 3 days we were there. The cottage was built in 1733!! (but thankfully it was refurbished recently). It was really charming, and a great place to return to each day. Here are a few photos of it... and yes, the ceilings were a little short (Ethan bumped his head more than once).
Our cottage was in the small village of Pooley Bridge. We were right around the corner from the village which had 3 pubs, some cute touristy shops, and most importantly, Ullswater Lake, which is the second largest lake in the district.

Soon after we arrived and settled in, we decided to drive around the lake to a nearby waterfall called Aira Force. The drive was just beautiful. The lake is surrounded by incredible mountains and the water was perfectly clear. The land in this whole area was wonderfully undeveloped. In fact, much of it is owned by the National Trust. (If you happened to see the somewhat recent movie called "Mrs. Potter" with Rene Zellweger about the life of the children's author/illustrator Beatrix Potter, you saw a little of how they made great efforts about 100 years ago to preserve the land from being over-exploited. They really did an incredible job.) There were many places that we could pull over and just walk down to the lake. Just beautiful....We soon arrived at the Aira Force park. We had a really lovely walk through the woods, admiring the huge evergreen trees that we don't see often in the English countryside, but which were plentiful here. The waterfall was really neat to see, but I think the children enjoyed seeing this "coin tree" even more. It may be hard to see in the picture, but this tree is full of coins! Over the years, people have hammered their coins into its bark. The kids tried doing this with a rock they found.

Anyway, the drive and nature walk were both wonderful ways to start our vacation. I'll blog more next time about our next day at Windermere, which is the largest lake in the region.