This weekend gave me some new experiences. I’ve never really been hiking and also never stayed in a youth hostel. I was invited to join some of my uni friends up in Coniston (in the Lake District) for a weekend of walking and more importantly beer drinking.
We travelled up on the Friday night (picking up 2 from Lancaster train station) arriving though the fog into Coniston by 10pm. The youth hostel was surprising nice, we were in a room of 8 (4 bunk beds). Since there was a strict, “doors close at 11” we scooted to the pub for a swift pint.

Saturday morning we got up at 7:30 for for our 8am cooked breakfast, and to collect our lunch. We set off fully fueled with bacon and sausage with Matt navigating. The task was a walk up to the top of a mountain called the “old man” of Coniston. The walk started with a walk up a very very steep road but soon turned into a stoney path.

This is the mountain we’re going to walk up. But not directly up the front, around the back over some other peaks

As we got the first peak on the way to the top of the ‘old man’ the fog started to rise from the valley towards us making for this excellent shot.

We then had to cover a few more peaks before finally making it to the top of the ‘old man’ by 1pm. Not bad going.
This is the huge collections of stones that’s at the top where we sat for lunch. A mighty fine lunch provided for us by the youth hostel.

Fully loaded with sandwiches, donuts, fruit and other goodies we set off to hit the next peak. Thankfully this started off as a nice gentle climb up to the next peak. The weather was amazing, it started off being foggy and a little cold but as we rose above the cloud cover it got warmer. You can see from this picture that the skys are blue and visibility is amazing

A few peaks later we decided to descend towards the village agin. This took us down a nice steep rocky side of the hills, dropping down in about 20 minutes. Only now can we truely see what we’d accomplished.

Then it was back to the Consiton FC club house for some well deserved beer!
We had planned to go walking again on the Sunday but the day before had worn us out a little so it was going to be a quiet one. To start we headed down to Lake Coniston to see how calm it is. You can see the fog sitting on top of the lake.

After this we headed (via ferry) to Windermere to look around and have something to drink and eat.

Rob had trouble all weekend with his car is was vibrating.
We now know why. His tyre was completely warns,

I think someone has been doing some emergency stops! Rob!