Month: June 2010

Lake District

This year, we spent 10 days or our holidays in the center of the Lake District, to explore this mountainous region of Great Britain, and 2 days near Hadrian’s wall, north-east of Corbridge.
At the Lake District, we had booked at the National Trust Campingsite near the end of Great Langdale, west of Ambleside. Not too expensive, without facilities like a swimming pool or restaurant, and with just a small shop; but quiet and no more light than needed.Out first intention was to stay there for five nights, but since it was so central to the area, we extended our stay and stayed there for the whole period.
The area is famous for its possibly bad weather – being the wettest part of England. But we were lucky. Most rain fell during the first nights, after three weeks of drought – and temperatures were well below normal. At night, it was freezing cold – minimal, but still. But it all improved, and we had pretty good weather for walking: over the fells, following parts of the Cumbria Way on some occasions, and the last leg of the Dales way – whic is very different.
Of course, we did a trip on Lake Windermere and and had a ride in a steam-train form the Southern shore atr Lakeside to the seaside at Haverswaithe, and back. That day turned out to be the only day that rain would have been a problem while walking.
We also had a few very sunny days, and quite warm, so it wasn’t too bad at all.

The last days were spent near Corbridge, allowing us a visit to Hadrian’s wall and Newcastle, before we travelled back.

Of course, all walks have been tracked, and a lot of images have been taken – quite a lot form a panoramic view of the area. But when working in the images, the disk crashed and that means I may have lost the tracking data… But I was lucky to have a copy of the raw image files, a backup of what I’d done already – and the raw tracking data. These have now been processed, here you can find the images and tracking data projected on the Ordnance Survey edition of Mapsource, and Google Earth, as well as all tracking data in the usual Garmin, generic and Excel, comma separated formats.

(Note dd. 02-Mar-2011: Not all tracking files are available uet, some must still be generated)

Havezatenpad 4: Goor – Markelo

The next part of the long-distance footpath would be Goor to Rijssen – since either has a railway station, travelling to get started – or to finish – would be easy. But that would mean a walk of 35 kilometers. Since the weather was fine and the actual distance between the two placses minor compared to the walk itself, we decided to cut this track in two, and walk from Goor to Markelo – a distance of about 20 kilometers, including the part from the station in Goor to the path – and cycle back along the main road – a mere 7 kilometers.
So we dropped the bikes at the Tourist Office in Markelo, drove on to Goor and started our walk – a long U-shape track, first South from Goor to the track, then to Diepenjeim where we had our rest, then bending slightly West tand finally North again.
We passed a number of estates – manors and halls – after which the path is named: Weldam, Nijenhuis, Diepenheim and Westerflier, in a rural, mainly agricultural landscape, but full of changes.
A number of images have been taken, and of course, the tracks are available in Garmin, General Exchange en CSV formats.