Via Ferrata, Badgers and Cream Teas

Mr Beet and I went to the Lake District for the long Easter weekend.  We stayed in a nice B & B in Patterdale near Ullswater.  Our room looked out onto a river and the owner told us to look out for otters, but we didn’t see any.  Mr Beet thought he saw one once, but it was a duck.  They are masters of disguise.

On the Saturday we went on a via ferrata, which we’ve wanted to do for a long time.  We were going to do one in Switzerland a couple of years ago but visibility was too poor.  Maybe it’s best to start in the Lake District hills before doing the Alps anyway.  A via ferrata is basically a very safe way of mountain (or in this case hill) climbing.  You are linked to a cable the whole way round and where there’s no ledge to walk on, they have drilled metal footholds into the rock face so you can get up.  It’s still pretty scary in places though.  Especially where you have to unclip and clip onto to the next section of cable.  You have two karabiners, so you’re never detached, but it’s pretty awkward to take a hand off to mess about with your karabiners when you’re trying to hang on to the rockface.

Here we are at the start:

And here we are waving like idiots while everyone else plays it cool.

Here’s Mr Beet on the zip wire

Me on the zip wire

Neither me nor Mr Beet, but a good photo of a scary part of the route.

Up at the top – quite deep snow in patches still and lovely views.

We then got taken back down the hill in the back of a land rover, which was the scariest bit of the whole day.

To set himself up for the via ferrata, Mr Beet had a cream tea in Keswick.  Mr Beet is something of a cream tea connoisseur.  This one did not get full marks, because it came with whipped rather than clotted cream.

But as you can see he managed to force it down.

After dinner on the saturday night we drove back to our B&B to find a badger having a root around by the back door.  The B&B owner puts food out for him so he is very tame and was quite unbothered by us driving up and leaving our car lights on so we could watch him snuffling about.

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