“I can’t back out now, after two glasses of wine I’m saying yes to anything and now I’m not on the wine I have regrets lol” text from Stacey first thing this morning.
Today we hit Scafell Pike in the Peak District. High winds were predicted and we crossed our fingers that they weren’t high winds like Storm Antoni gave us (ie 50-70mph winds).
From dinner the night before, Stacey had committed to join us on our hike (despite living in the Lakes District, she’d never done any of the hikes!) and to meet at the car park at 10am. You can see from the opening paragraph, that I checked to see that she was still joining us (affirmative!).
Our accommodation provided breakfast, and so a nice hot brekky was in order. Really it was just so that I could try black pudding. The BP was inoffensive, but not something that I’d feel the need to chase down in the future.
We were slightly late to the car park, as we hit a Cumbrian traffic jam.
With 5 (or so) miles to hike and 8xx metres to climb, it was time to hit the road. The scenery was stunning, but there was a clear roof of clouds, so this was to be another foggy ascent.
Given that we knew we were hiking into fog, we took photos early and at every opportunity!
Scafell is known for being a bit of a scrappy scrabble at times, it’s also known for being windy. So when Lesley’s phone said it was going to be windy, we just hoped that it wasn’t in the same measure as Storm Antoni….. It was. We had 65-75 mph winds that tended to make things a bit difficult! At times you’d lift your leg to move it forward and it would get blown out to the side…. So it was a bit on the gusty side!!
Once we were in the clouds, it was heads down and head up to the top. As you can imagine, up there it was gale force winds and thick fog. From time to time, you really had to concentrate on the footpath, or else you’d end up totally off the path.
We hit the top and hightailed it back down (there was no view to hold you at the top anyway).
Lesley claims “fall of the day”, with the most interesting slow motion fall, roll, upside down manoeuvre. She slid on her ankle, gracefully fell to her knees, gravity took over and she rolled to her back and ended up headfirst down the hill! No damage done! Stacey and I hefted Les back up and after a small dusting off, all was well! I wouldn’t have been that graceful!!
The climb down, once you got over the scrappy stuff, was much nicer. Once we got down, it was time to give Stacey the biggest hug and sad good byes and then we needed to hightail it to Scotland, as we still had 5.5hrs to get to the camp site.
Lesley and I have been taking too much advantage of the long day light hours. Meaning that we pull into our accomodation at late hours as we squeeze faaaar too much into every day. There are times that we check the time and wonder where the day has gone!
We called our campsite to let them know that we would be late in (crossing our fingers that they would still let us in). We made it to site by 9:15pm and still managed to set up the tent in the twilight/sunset. Bed came quickly after that, with 2 things on the shopping list for the morning…. 1) WINE 2) Midgie spray!
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