This was to be one of our longest segments of the walk: fourteen miles to Rosthwaite. It would be longer if we made navigational mistakes. There was no room for error. So, of course, upon leaving the farm, we immediately turned right when we should have turned left.Fellow walkers were right behind us. We pretended we had purposely turned right to see the “false stones,” pictured here behind Mary, so the other people wouldn't think we were stupid. These are fake ring stones put up by an archeologist who wanted to “discover” something significant.
Obviously using two maps, one guidebook, one compass, and a GPS hadn’t worked well enough.
It was another beautiful, sunny morning -- extraordinary luck this time of year. Through the branches of trees, we glimpsed Ennerdale Water, the lake that signaled the beginning of our walk.
First we had to walk through the town of Ennerdale Bridge. Although it’s a main stopping point for walkers, it is a very small place. A group of school kids were crowded at one end of their playground, with clipboards and plastic bags in hand. They hollered to us and Frank went over. They wanted to survey us and to have us mail them a postcard two stops from now. The baggie held a postage stamp and their address. We went to the famous (maybe) Shepherd’s Arms to buy postcards and F&M talked another tourist group into taking the survey and coughing up a card. Our long walk hadn’t really begun and we had already spent about a half an hour futzing around.

At last, at the shore of Ennerdale Water.
What do I know of Ennerdale Water? It’s big. It’s deceptively big because you can’t see the whole of the lake from one end. It twists around the bend. Every time I thought it was the bend to end all bends, I could see another bend ahead. The road wasn’t too rocky, except for over Robin Hood’s chair where we had to pretend to be mountain goats, and it soon changed to mystical forest land. Why, you could even imagine fairies living in those woods.

And what the heck are these bumpy things anyway? No one offered to investigate.

These beautiful violets grow in the most unlikely places, both warm and cold, along the trail.

The land changed dramatically from the placid lakeside to a roaring river. The path got rockier and sketchier at times. Upon crossing a bridge to the other side of the river, we found a road … which soon degenerated into a rocky path. See that last picture? Guess where the rocky path is heading. The answer is not “down.”
Sometimes the rocky path disappeared or there was a fork in the road, and we would have to vote on which way to go. Our luck held and every choice we made was the correct one. Stories abound of travelers who chose erroneously. We think we’ve discovered some of the shredded guidebooks they must have cast aside to lighten their load as they struggled to find their way home.
If you are one of the few and mighty who make it to the top, this vista of the valley you’ve just come through, with Ennerdale Water in sight, is your reward.

After traversing a bleak, cold, boggy, and windy stretch at the top, we were happy to spot an abandoned slate mine, the sign that our descent into the “thwaits” (a collection of small towns with "thwait" at the end), of which Rosthwaite is one, was about to begin.
The descent is nothing to write home about, so of course I’m going to write about it. A lot of it is on a bleak switchback road going from the slate mine to a visitor’s center below. Tom fortunately found the track again and most of us abandoned the roadway -- except for Frank. We all thought the track would intersect the roadway soon, so no problem.The track went higher and more to the left, leaving the roadway far below and away. We finally dropped down into one of the thwaits and tried to place a call at a phone booth to let our B&B know we were going to be late, but there was someone using the phone. (The B&Bs are instructed to call for help if a Mickeldore -- our scheduling company -- guest is not there by 8:00 p.m.)
The person on the phone must have had a lot to say because ten minutes later we were still waiting. Rather than wait any longer, we decided to plunge on, one eye on the highway, which we had finally joined, to see if we could spot Frank. The track, of course, almost immediately turned away from the highway again. At times, we weren’t even sure it was a track. At one point we were shuffling across a narrow ledge, using an iron chain drilled into the rock as a handhold.
Jonathan was supposed to join us in Rosthwaite, but we hadn’t the vaguest idea when he was scheduled to arrive. Using the maps, we honed in on the B&B, hoping to hear that Jonathan had arrived and what had happened to Frank.
About a block from the B&B, there walking toward us was Jonathan. We walked to the B&B together, and there outside the B&B was Frank, freshly showered and begging the proprietress to delay dinner until we arrived. (Her answer, by the way, was "Dinner is at 7, sorry." That was okay, because it was 6:45.) Mary, Tom, and I claimed the philosophical high road, because we had stuck to Wainwright’s course to arrive at our destination.
The B&B was high-end; Tom and I had a hair dryer, three beds, room to spread our suitcases and backpacks around, and lots of plugs -- but no internet.
Our day’s trip had gone from 100 feet to 1100 feet (and up and down a few more times, but without the dramatic change in elevation). We had walked on tarmac, gravel, dirt, rocks, more rocks, many more rocks, rock steps, endless rock steps, endless steep rock steps, and bog. We were in pain. Advil is god.
We made plans with Jonathan to start off on one of the easier segments of the trip the next day, so the guidebook and the landlord of the B&B informed us. The landlord said that we would be in Grasmere in time for lunch. Yay! An easy day!

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