Languishing in the Lake District

We finally made it to the Lake District and we had high hopes that we had left the hills behind us. Not a chance. The hills (really mountain ranges) were massive and frequent. The Senior Doctor was not best pleased as she has a healthy dislike of hills established in the Highlands and the Lake District just reinforced her views that she and hills were not as they say sympathetico. However not one to be put off by a bit of diversity she battled on from Keswick to Kendal and finally to the Forrest of Bowland

 

 

 

The first thing to say is that we did not see ant trees in the so called The Forrest of Bowland, just hills and more hills. In fact we were both eating, sleeping and living hills during our time in the erstwhile Forrest. The SD suggested a better name would have been the Hills of Bowland and then it would probably have been flat and completely covered in trees.

The piece de resistance of the FoB was the Cross of Greet. The mere mention of this landmark is enough to send the SD into a paroxysm of loathing., not a pleasant think to behold so I won't go into great detail here. While passing this large stone emblazoned with a minute cross we were being hit with gale force winds, Horizontal rain directly into our faces and finally a hail storm, but as my mother used to say " you'll  never do anything in Britain if you waited for good weather". How apt for the Forrest of Bowland.

Our final act in the Lakes was to tackle a veritable cavalcade of hills to exit down into Blackburn and onwards to the Cheshire plain. We had developed our sea legs by this point, or perhaps more appropriately our hill thighs - the SD does not approve of this term so let's just stick with the metaphor of sea legs - so we were congratulating ourselves of conquering this final hilly section of the route in an hour and a half when another passing cyclist told us that this hill section had been included in the Toure de France as a stage 2 hill climb - I wasn't shire what this ment but it sounded serious! He also told us that the hill section we had just done was included in the Forrest of Bowland Badass Ultra Sportive ride, supposed to be one of the hardest ultra sportive rides around. These facts triggered a general feeling that we had finally won our spurs as 2 fully fledged members of the cycling fraternity - me and Bradley Wiggins like brothers.    

 

Oh by the way Keswick does have a fine cinema. I wanted to go but the film was the BFG and the Senior Doctor said she didn't like horror films, particularly directed by Stephen King, or what ever his name was, so that put an end to that.

 

Let's on to the city hotspots of the Cheshire plains.