Day 12: I am not an experienced mountain biker

I decided to try a bike hire today; the weather wasn't great (cloudy with a light drizzle) but I would not let that stop me from exploring the Lake District. So I hopped on a little mountain bike and went over to the other side of Windermere.

Since I had a mountain bike and not a road bike, and since it was a bit small and annoying to ride around on the roads, I thought I would try mountain biking. I found a little book on good trails in the area, and even got a discount from the very nice man operating the cash register.

Then some stupid things went through my head. I am a pretty good cyclist, but my experience is limited to roads. I have gone mountain biking two or three times in my life, and never solo. But I figured that it couldn't be that difficult, and easy runs are usually pretty mind-numbingly doable, so I thought I'd go for a moderate. I failed to actually read the book, though, because the trails were not labeled easy/medium/hard but were in fact organized into medium, hard, and very hard trails. But more of that later.

I took the car ferry to the other side of the lake and started pedalling. One pleasant thing I learned is that, although it's surprisingly difficult to get used the British flow of traffic as a pedestrian (I still get confused about which ways cars will come when I cross roads), when you're actually using the road it's pretty easy to figure out. Soon I was making right turns and left turns like a natural!

And the view from the road was wonderful. Great grassy hills with little woods covering the top and sheep and cows adding some color to the green. It was a sight to see.

Rolling grassland as far as the eye can see

Church! Cows!

I even passed by Beatrix Potter's old house, Hill Top, which is just outside the bustling metropolis of Near Sawrey. It seemed nice, but there was already a long queue to get in and I wasn't about to buy tickets. 

The house, from an empty driveway nearby. Looks pretty nice

The busy downtown of Near Sawrey

I headed onward and finally found my starting point, a paved lane that soon turned into a dirt track and then a stony path. It was uphill and slow going to begin with, and I made a couple of emergency stops on slopes that I then had to walk the rest of the way, and I took two wrong turnings before I finally got where I needed to be, but it was pretty enjoyable. Biked by a couple of ponds (called tarns for some reason), Moss Eccles Tarn and another one whose name escapes me. 

Moss Eccles Tarn

I climbed some more, passed some mountain bikers who were a bit slower and more timid on the occasional downhill, and found myself at the top and ready to descend. This was the bit I had been waiting for. This was going to be awesome. 

And it was, at least initially. I spent most of it either pulling hard on the breaks or holding onto the handlebars for dear life, but it was a wild ride. I fell a few times and got pretty muddy but I started figuring out how to choose a path and avoid the big stones and lumps of grass in the middle because they led to immediate and inevitable falls. 

Then it started getting out of hand. I was wet and covered in mud and getting cold. I came to a steep cobbled bit, and the slippery stones were becoming more and more difficult to navigate until I crashed for the fourth time, bruising my knee and my palm fairly severely. I swore profusely and gave up. The trail had defeated me. 

At least I failed somewhere pretty

My competition drive kept at me for a while, and at the bottom of the hellish trail I had just walked (carrying an obnoxiously heavy piece of metal that was next to useless) I paused for a good ten minutes deliberating whether or not to go on. I almost did (although I was going to follow an abbreviated version of the course that cut out the "thrilling" descent that would probably kill me) until I tried to start on an uphill, couldn't get moving, and turned around to follow the nice wide gravel path back to the ferry. 

I returned to my lodgings and took a nice bath, then returned the now much muddier bike to the rental place and walked around Windermere and Bowness (the town that's actually on the lake). Because the bike hire had been pretty expensive and I was tired of saying "Table for one, please," I got some food at a grocery store and had a nice meal on that same pier I found yesterday. It was quite peaceful and I was even joined by a little family of ducks. Then a group of people decided to have a lake swimming lesson right around my lakeside dining area and a sailboat motored up and parked nearby; I can only assume they were members of the Cumbrian mafia discussing whose death they would have to order in order to keep their dairy monopoly. 

Duck family!

I think there was a sailing class going on across the lake. Looked fun.

Eventually I got too cold and headed back. Today was not a particularly active day; I was done by seven thirty and just watched Netflix until I fell asleep.