Walla Crag Yesterday...Solway Coast Today

Yesterday was half lazy and half not. We had what is called here as a "lie in" and had a lazy morning sitting around, sleeping in and playing on the computer and messing with our pictures.  Andrew and Victoria showed up at lunch for our afternoon excursion.  The evening before Dad and Victoria worked out a Lake District hike for us to do a test run before we head to West Highland Way.  We began our trek at the "car park" near Derwentwater Lake and walked about a half mile path to the start of the trail to Walla Crag.  A crag is the north England word for a large rocky mountain.  At the start of the trip Dad said it was only 2.5 miles.  Didn't sound too bad, I should know better than to believe the distances he gives me.  We walked and walked and then found the grade was quite steep and all up hill.  I was not really enjoying his choice of warm up hikes but we all trudged on just the same.

Walla Crag..yup we went to the top of that!

Even though we had some difficulty going up the views were very well worth it.  We walked across the top of the ridge and down the other side, which consisted of several sets of stone stairs. We didn't take any pictures because it required some concentration to come down that side as it was twice as steep from where we went up. Once down the trail went along the lake and back to the car park. It turned out to be almost a 5 mile walk and at the highest point the elevation was 1243 ft.  From the bottom near the lake to the top of the crag we changed about 1000 ft in elevation...twice! Once you got over all the hill climbing it was really fun.

View from on top of Walla Crag 

After having a busy afternoon yesterday, we had another fairly busy day today.  We toured the local school this morning.  David (another cousin, Andrew's father) is a retired history teacher and made arrangements for us to see the school.  I toured this school once before when I was here 11 years ago but my interests were different at 18 than they are now.  We had a 6th Form student (equivalent to our seniors) give us the tour.  He was very knowledgeable and did a great job showing us around. There seems to be more subjects offered, the technology is amazing, students work harder and the discipline is much better.  I was considering becoming a teacher in the British school system when I was done seeing that place.  We didn't take any pictures as we didn't want to be more of disruption that we already were.  Once we return from our walk we have the opportunity to arrange to spend a full day in the school observing lessons in our subject areas if we like. We have not yet decided but it does sound like something that would be really interesting. 

In the afternoon we took a short trip to the beach in a little village called Allonby (pronounced Allen-bee) that is only about 10 miles from here.   We spent a short time walking the beach of the Irish Sea and mother and I has some fun treasure searching.  We found lots of shells like on any other beach but also found lots of broken bits of china like from cups, plates, saucers etc.  We are not sure it they are something that might be old but we don't generally find ornately painted china pieces on our beach so it peaked our interest. Once our treasure hunting was over we had an ice cream at popular shop and then went back to Wigton for dinner and rest.

Chad on the beach at Allonby

Kari searching for treasures

More adventures begin tomorrow.  We head for the 10:43am train from Carlisle to Glasgow, Scotland tomorrow.  We will be staying the night in the Glasgow Youth Hostel and then walking 10 miles to Milngavie (pronounced Mill-guy) which is the official start of the West Highland Way. I am not sure at this point how much internet access we will have along the way.  I will attempt to blog each stage of the walk but might have to skip days if internet access is sketchy.  Post again soon and thanks for reading!