Monday morning after the choral tour was over we packed up, checked out of the Novotel London West, and caught the tube out to Heathrow to pick up our rental car which turned out to be a VW Polo…a model we had never seen before, and in contrast to our last rental car over in the UK this one was petrol (gas) instead of diesel powered. Essentially a small 4 door hatchback…they offered us a larger one for the same price (or maybe more, we didn’t ask) but knowing the likely roads we would see we declined since we wanted as small as we could get. Once we got out of the Hertz location at the airport we made a couple of errant turns due to a combination of the GPS app we were using…Navmii…which is adequate but not as good as either our Garmin app that we didn’t have UK maps for or Apple Maps…which required phone signal to work and since we were in cellular of mode…long story there…so we just used Navmii like we did in Ireland some years back. Combined with the less than stellar navigation ability (the app tended to lag behind real time where you actually were and also seemed to have it’s own definition on what was a turn…sometimes there was just a cure in the road where what was obviously a driveway went off and it called it a turn…then later on you would get to what was obviously a road junction and it would not tell you which way to go other than looking at where the purple line in the app went sans any voice or other directions) was Neil getting refamiliarized with (a) being on the wrong side of the road…it only took him 2 or 3 days to get used to that again…and (b) being on the wrong side of the car while driving…again he got used to this and by the middle of the second week with the car it almost seemed normal to him. Anyways…we headed north towards Keswick and the Rickerby Inn B&B which was to be our home for 4 days. This essentially headed us the M1 which is like I-95, the main north/south freeway…it rained most of the way up but then it rained most days while we were there anyway so that was situation normal I guess. 

Cellular woes…we actually tried to have cellular service but both of the attempts that Neil tried failed miserably. First up was this company named GiffGaff which send you a SIM to plug into your phones and then you would activate it with a plan…we were going to activate the 20 GB plan for about 20 bucks and that would have us both a UK phone number so we could text back and forth as well as data so we coulda used Apple Maps for better navigation. We got the  SIMs in the mail and Neil tried to activate them by following their instructions to go to the company website…and it turned out that their website was basically broken. Neil tried 3 different browsers on his laptop, turned off al contact blockers, and also tried the same things on his iPad but once you entered your SIM number and email address (and yes, he tried about 3 different email addresses as well) and clicked Next so they would send you a validation code to enter…the web page just sat there, didn’t go to the “enter the validation code page”, and didn’t send the code anyway. He tried this 3 times over the course of 4 days and finally gave up and went to plan B. Plan B was to get an eSIM from this company name Airalo…they’re based in Singapore and claim to offer eSIMs for 100 countries or something like that. So he buys an eSIM after verifying that his iPhone XS Max was both eSIM capable and unlocked…and got the eSIM in his email. Followed the instructions to install the eSIM and about halfway through the instal got the error message “This iPhone is not eSIM capable”…which is just plain wrong. Tried again and it said “this one has already been installed”…so he gave up there and cancelled the credit card transaction. Under both plan A and plan B…he was gonna forward both of their phone numbers to a google voice number so that any texts or voice mails to either phone would get turned into an email.

With plans A and B both in the toilet…he went to plan C…which was to just put our phones in cellular off mode which meant no text or phone and use wifi in the hotel and pubs as well as turning wifi calling on so that if the phones were on wife calls would go through…and they would just turn their phones cellular on at a cost of $15 per 24 hour period for days when they needed to be able to text each other…which turned out to be 3 days total for a cost of about an an extra $50.

English roads…there are some good things about them…and then there’s some bad things about them. Good is that they have standard speed limits depending on whether it was an M, A, B, or C road…but some of the speed limits, particularly on B and C roads but also on some A ones…were just nuts…I gotta a picture of one of the B roads in a bit to help explain that. When you got into a town or village there were actually speed limit signs…but as you exited you passed the sign that meant “no speed restrictions” which meant it went back to whatever the standard speed was for that road.

Unfortunately…the B, C, and some A roads were definitely not wide enough for 2 vehicles to pass…so just as in Ireland whoever had the easiest way to pull into a slightly wider part or the rare shoulder or a driveway just did it…mostly Neil just pulled over and stopped and let them pass him for the first week as the narrowness caused him stress.

And…although we didn’t get a picture of it…we drove down the narrowest street we have ever been on in a car…it was named High Street and literally had stone walls on both sides covered with shrubbery/ivy…and the vines were rubbing both sides of the car as we drove. We passed some hikers and walkers and they literally had to hop up onto a stone in the wall to let us pass…I don’t know what we would have done if we ran into a car going the other way because for about 3 miles there were literally zero places to either pass a car or pull into a drive due to the stone walls.

So…what’s the Lake District National Park like…except for the narrow roads? The closest I can call it is very similar to the hollers and ridges of rural West Virginia…narrow steep walled valleys with lakes at the bottom of them separated by ridges and mountains maybe 1500 feet or more higher than the valleys.

Wildlife was pretty slim…in fact Neil turned out to have brought along his 100-400mm zoom lens in vain as it never left the bag. About 90% of his shots were with his walking around 24-120 lens with the remainder from the 14-30 super wide angle. This was about the only wildlife we saw outside of livestock…a bunny in the private garden outside of our room at the Rickerby Inn.

One of the many castles that aren’t actually a castle that we saw…everybody knows that any real castle has a moat around it…and this one doesn’t look like it would have withstood much of a siege.

This is a B road…Connie took this out the windshield with her iPhone…and this is actually a road with a speed limit of 50 miles an hour. Definitely wider than the car by about 3 feet total and no way to pass except at selected locations. Take a look at the sky…this was actually one of the better weather days we had in both Lakes and Yorkshire Dales.

This is the Castlerigg Stone Circle…built about 4,500 years ago…the same general time period as Stonehenge but obviously these folks had less ability to move really big stones around.

Some flowers we saw at the next castle.

This ‘castle’…again no moat so obviously not a castle at all…was built as a private residence in the late 1800s…well after the need for any sort of castle protection as England was pretty much settled and pacified by then…but apparently at the time building your own ‘castle’ was in vogue.

Out back in the gardens of this castle where we got the flowers above there was also this downed tree that had thousands of penny coins embedded in it…there was no explanation that we could find as to why this was a thing.

By the time we got to Lakes…the bronchitis that we ended up coming home with had taken hold of both Connie and Neil although his was worse…so of the 4 days there we actually only went anyplace 3 of them…after arriving on Monday with the 300ish mile drive up from London he was just wiped and slept most of Tuesday except for eating dinner…and it was pouring rain that day anyway.

Friday we checked out of the Rickerby Inn and after stopping on the way at the last castle above arrived in Skipton on the southern border of Yorkshire Dales National Park where we were to stay until the following Thursday.

We did make it to our scheduled tour and tasting at the Lakes Distillery…they make whiskey and flavored vodka. Neil passed on the tasting as he (a) was driving and not comfortable with the roads yet and (b) feeling pretty lousy…so they gave him what they call a Drivers Dram to have later…we brought that and some salted caramel vodka home as souvenirs.

Interesting things found on the net.

Cyas.