Reasons to be Cheerful: Family, Friends and Fun #R2BC

Miracles happen and I am ready on time with my host post! Really hoping that more of you will be back this week even if it is the UK school holidays. Here are my reasons to be cheerful on what is the first week of our Easter holidays:

1) End of Term

We all finished school on Friday and after meeting in town we had a surprise and bumped into my mum for a 3 generation walk home in the sun:

Two weeks of no school runs is heavenly and hopefully we will have lots of reasons to smile by the end of a fortnight.

2) Fun in the sun with friends

My son and I travelled down to Berkshire on what turned out to be the hottest weekend of the year so far. We had a fabulous weekend with friends and my son loved all their outdoor play equipment:

3) Football Golf

Family Fun: A Frosty Hike Up Loughrigg

I just love living on the doorstep of one of the most beautiful corners of the United Kingdom. On a day like today when the sun shone, the sky was blue and the temperature never got above 5C it was a marvellous place for a hike. We wrapped up warm with plenty of layers, tied up the hiking boots, grabbed the walking poles and headed off to Rydal Water, Loughrigg Fell, Grasmere and the Rydal coffin trail:

Rydal Water

On our way we saw lots of beautiful things:

Icicles over waterfall

Wainwright bagging (2): Loughrigg Fell

Today my mum invited me to join her on a walk up Loughrigg Fell so she could check out part of the route for a Ramblers walk tomorrow. It was a fine Cumbrian day for a bit of fell walking using the Wainwright book as a guide to follow along with the Ordnance Survey map. There are so many little and large paths across the fell it is very easy to take the wrong one and in the book Wainwright warns of the dangers of mists on this fell. 


On this occasion we took all the right routes and had our first fab views from the cairn on the secondary summit. Even though it was midweek there were plenty of people coming up the fell from various directions as its accesible from plenty of paths. Coming up from Rydal like us is one of the gentlest routes and as we climbed we had many glimpses of places such as Windermere from a height:

Then we had a little boggy walk and a scramble up to the final top. It was amazing to see so many of the Lakes fells from the top. All of them much higher than the 1099ft of Loughrigg and a challenge for future days. My mum snapped me with the trig point just to prove that I had actually made it:

trig points hide a multitude of sins!

The descent down to Grasmere was mostly stone steps that had been created to mend the path. This actually made it a slightly less comfortable path to walk on and is apparently very slippery after rain. The reason for coming down this way became clear as we got close enough to admire the waters of Grasmere from above:

Just above the lake we chose to take the mid height path which took us through the abandoned quarry and let us see in the caves that were created by the quarrying of slate in the past. As Wainwright said you could fit the whole population of Ambleside inside the cave, even if some would be rather wet:

It was then a simple stroll back to the car park after our little meander up the fell. This was my second Wainwright as far as I know so I only have a couple of hundred to go!