A Proper Holiday
After the debacle of COVID we owed ourselves a proper holiday in the summer of 2021. We weren’t quite ready to explore overseas though, so we went for “Old Faithful” with a trip up to The Lakes.
It was quite strange as a holiday, partly because COVID hadn’t really gone away. A few places weren’t really open properly, and some were hit by random COVID outbreaks while we were there.
Travelling and Staying
For this trip we stayed at the The Swan, Grasmere. It strains the definition of “Grasmere” quite a lot, because it’s up on the main A591 roas that crosses Dunmail Raise on the way to Keswick. We were quite late in booking, so we didn’t have a lot of choice and some other hotels in the area were really, really expensive. The Swan looked functional and had its own restaurant. That proved really useful. They’d adopted a policy that residents would always be found a table in the restaurant on demand, even if they hadn’t booked one. That was great on a couple of nights, when we walked into Grasmere and failed to find anything better.
Back at the plot, we booked two rooms – a double and a twin. They were twee and not particularly up to date, but they were well stocked and clean. And the beds were good. The decoration got fixed not long after we went. A refurbishment programme scheduled for the previous year had been deferred, what with nobody being able to go and work there for most of the summer.
For travelling, we took my relatively new but already trusty Mercedes. Not the most convenient of cars for tight roads in Cumbria, but definitely suitable for taking four people on holiday for a fortnight.
Actually it wasn’t a fortnight really. We booked in The Swan for a week. After that we’d had promised to drive over to Sunderland for a couple of nights on the way back. Again, not really on the way back, but it’s family, innit?
The weather was up-and-down, but generally not great. We spent a few days splitting up to do different things, and a few all together.
Individual Posts
So here are all the individual posts for this trip. When I moved to a new domain a little while ago I didn’t initially add many of these in because there wasn’t much focus on geocaching or on Wainwrights, but it seems a shame not to post them. So the originals will gradually be put back into place.
Grasmere
Borrowdale
