lessons from mountains

We headed out to bag 7 Wainwright’s today, well aware of how challenging this might be for little legs. So the owners of the little legs got our full attention and we forgot to do the usual (and pretty vital stuff) along the way. We were doing Fairfield Horseshoe and as we’ve done it before (and how could you possibly go wrong on a horseshoe walk), we didn’t really consult the map aside from when the children wanted to check our progress on the way up. The compass didn’t even come out of our pockets. Worse still, we told the kids about the couple we’d met in Ambleside some 9 years ago who had managed to take a wrong turn somewhere up in these hills and had descended into Ambleside instead of Patterdale where their car was. We’d given said couple a lift back to Patterdale and congratulated ourselves on being far more competent than they...... well pride comes before a fall, even if the fall takes 9 years to come about.

It wasn’t until the end of our descent that Ant and I started to comment that the view ahead looked a little odd. The lake wasn’t surrounded by the correct towns and seemed to have grown a few extra little islands - but surely it was the angle we were looking from and Ambleside must be tucked behind our final peak, just out of sight. Eventually, to make absolutely sure we weren’t looking at Ullswater as opposed to Windermere, I fished my phone out of my pocket and it popped a pin in our location.... just above Patterdale where we’d driven that poor couple years before. We had no time to turn back and two absolutely exhausted children so headed to the very pub we’d taken that couple and asked the landlord for help sorting a taxi back to our car. Feeling like a pair of plums! The children were awesome and were pleased to hear they’d still bagged 7 Wainwright’s..... just not the ones they’d expected.

The kindest taxi man in the world transported us back over to Ambleside and we dutifully listened to his very good advice about checking the map and compass regularly. Eventually we found chips to cheer everyone up and made our way back to Glossop where our poor exhausted little ones were finally tucked in, many hours past their usual bedtime.

Gratefuls:

1. Time on the mountains, even if they show us up they’re still flipping lovely and make us feel alive;
2. Safety. It could have been far worse and the children managed some (fun) scrambles really calmly and confidently;
3. Ant who preps well and hates it when he goes wrong, but always learns the lesson with humility.