After being discharged from Hospital we spent the R & R time around England. Dal and Renata had vacation time so we packed up the family and headed for the Lakes District in Cumbria near the Scotland border. We camped at Lake Windermere and spent time exploring the surrounding countryside. We visited Grasmere, a picturesque little village where William Wordsworth is buried. The place is tiny but has a magnetic charm. It was a cold Spring day and we warmed ourselves with lunch in a splendid little cafe overlooking the River Rothay.
We visited the Beatrix Potter Museum at Browness then took the ferry across Lake Windermere to Lakeside where we took the vintage steam train of the Lakeside & Haverthwaite Railway to the old Haverthwaite Station. It is a five kilometre journey along the River Leven Valley through the rural Cumbrian countryside. The trip back across the lake to Browness was under a brooding sky with a freezing wind.
The next day dawned bright if a little cold and we set off North to Haltwistle in Northumbria for a visit to Hadrian's Wall. This was the northern reach of the Roman Empire. Though much of the infrastructure that Rome built along its 73 mile length is gone there is still quite a bit of the wall intact. We parked at Steel Rigg and walked along the wall path to Sycamore Gap made famous by the Keven Costner movie Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. The path is also part of the Pennine Way, a national trail created in 1965 and sometimes call the backbone of England. We followed the path to Housesteads Roman Fort. Only the bare bones of the fort's foundation still exist but you can see from the barracks ruin and adjoining support buildings that this was a major strategic outpost. The view of the surrounding landscape is spectacular and far reaching. We finished trip with lunch in the warm and cosy Twice Brewed Inn.
After six weeks of recovery and a trip back to the hospital for a final stress test it was time to continue our Europe adventure. We decided on a shortened trip to just France.
