mutteringhousewife

If you’ve been keeping up with the muttering housewife travels across England, you’ll see there’s been a lot of walking up hills and also down hills in the last three days, which has of course been delightful but also somewhat taxing on the joints and incipient bunions. The Commander, with his formidable insight, booked us a rest day in Grasmere so our bodies could process what we’d been doing to them and also we could catch up on what one’s PhD student has been up to and maybe do a spot of washing.

Grasmere is a delightful little town pretty much geared to the energetic tourist trade, so runs very much to outdoors shops, galleries, tea shops, purveyors of beer and such like. And sweet little places of accommodation like where we are lucky enough to stay for two nights, Heidi’s Cafe.

That’s our verandah on top of the sign, where we drank beer and ate crisps this afternoon while giving feedback on a PhD chapter (me) and working out the next days route (the Commander). The room behind it is equally charming, although with an alarming number of hand painted closeups of cow’s muzzles adorning the walls.

What Grasmere lacks, surprising in a town so accommodating of fell walkers, is a laundry. It does, however, have a seriously astonishing jigsaw shop with countless numbers of 1000 piece puzzles on any theme you could name, but also, for the connoisseur, puzzles of up to forty two thousand pieces. The weather must get terrible here.

I do like to have clean clothes, so I gathered together all of our dirty clothes for the last five days, accumulated all of our change, and caught the bus to Ambleside, a slightly larger version of Grasmere a fifteen minute bus ride southwest. The laundromat was conveniently located about thirty metres from the bus stop and thanks to Google reviews I was ready with my six pounds change for the machine, a further four pounds for the dryer, and my own laundry powder. I took a little walk around the town to replenish our supply of sweets (jelly babies and Kendall mint cake for me, wine gums for the Commander), got a superb coffee from Cafe Altitude up three flights of stairs, then bundled self and our clean dry clothes onto the top of the bus back to Grasmere before lunch and what a treat of a bus ride it was. Open to the sunny skies with a recorded commentary on the lakes and notable houses along the road and I was one of only three people up there.

While I’d been gone, the Commander had laid in supplies of Grasmere’s famous gingerbread for the days ahead. Our accommodation always includes as much breakfast as you could possibly handle, and dinner portions are enormous so we’ve been eating lightly at lunch out on the fells. The plan is for the next few days to have ginger bread for lunch, and I can’t wait.

As you could imagine, there are people other than us walking across England, and one cannot help but bump into them from time to time, and that has also been lovely, swapping stories, admiring each others’ hiking socks, comparing how deeply we sank into the bog. They tend to be older people, I guess who are semi or fully retired who have the time and money to do this. Makes us think that this might be the start for us of a whole series of walking adventures. I might have to update this thought later in the trip.