Chris and Jak’s Lakeland Adventure Friday 140510

Floutern Tarn
Ennerdale Water

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I didn’t sleep very well as was concerned about my rucksack being too heavy. I arrived at Chris’ house to find her still squeezing the kitchen sink into her rucksack. We set off and stopped at the services near Lancaster to take advantage of Marks and Spencer. We took advantage of a few other things and nearly froze to death waiting for our drinks at Costa Coffee, which wasn’t giving me any points for my Costa Coffee card. We both got nice healthy salads for lunch and filled wraps for the next day’s lunch. About an hour later we arrived at Bowness Knot car park which thankfully was free – I’m not sure what we would have done if a ticket machine needed to be fed with money over 3 days. We lunched before getting going.
We finally left the car park and plodded along the road, it was hard to get used to the full pack and various aches and pains came and went. Set off along the footpath only to find that it was obstructed by a fallen tree/bush. This meant we had to crawl through dragging our packs with us. We took it all slow and steady, stopping to watch shepherding by quad bike, motorbike and dog. Seemed to involve a lot of shouting for no particularly obvious purpose. No whistling or arcane gestures sadly. Whatever happened to “One Man and his Dog“? That answers that then, how weird it’s still going, bit like the Archers.
We continued to rise gently and reached Floutern Tarn at about 5.30. We were very careful about picking a camp site, and ended up close to the lake’s edge but not too close on a nice dry spot which was reasonably flat and a bit sheltered from the wind.
Next we pitched the tents which for me took forever as I’d put it away with some of the tent attached to the wrong bits of the flysheet. Chris got her Vango Banshee up pretty quickly. My Vango Spirit followed. By this time it was starting to get a bit nippy so I trudged back up the hill to find a phone signal, fabulous views across to Haystacks.
Returning to camp, we quickly got cooking. Settled on 2 curries and rice. This was just about the right amount of food and was hot and quick to prepare. Great. Then Chris came in my slightly bigger tent to do the crossword. Then although it was still light it was time to try and get warm enough to sleep. This proved hard for both of us, Chris only had a lightweight down bag with silk liner so she wore most of her clothes. I had a heavier weight down bag and was warm on top but my feet were like lumps of ice. Eventually when it finally got a little bit dark, I took my socks off and rubbed my feet together and then they got warm and I managed to sleep. My self inflating sleeping mat was good, a huge improvement on Karrimats.
I’m not sure how much less I would carry to keep the weight down, my tent is heavier than I thought, 3 litres of water is heavy but I used most of it. The most important thing we didn’t have was any rum!

Please visit Map and Compass and learn how to interpret a map with me and my navigation partner, Cath.

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