Lake District to Liverpool

We had been on the road now with our fellow travelers for one week, moving from one hotel to another, and everyone had fallen into the routine of early rising, packing quickly, eating breakfast, and climbing into our coach.  Martha and I became very efficient at packing and unpacking when we took our Mini Cooper across the United States on a 30-day trip three years ago, and some of the others were practiced  travelers.  But I was surprised that there had not been late-comers or forgotten items.  Steve had a routine of personally checking all of the suitcases in the lobby, then he would count heads when we got on the coach.  "Have a little think, now.  Have we forgotten anything?  Mobiles, chargers?  Money under the mattress?"

This morning we entered the Lake District, which surely has the most stunning scenery in England.  We passed Levens Hall, a manor house along the road with famous topiary.  We have topiary like that in rural South Carolina, climbing up utility poles and overwhelming small outbuildings and junk cars!  But it looks a little more ragged.

We had an eventful day planned for today, beginning with a stop at the Haverthwaite Railroad Station and an authentic steam train.  The station looked like something out of an old British movie; one could imagine commuters with umbrellas and newspapers under their arms, waiting to board their coach for the city.  In fact, I learned an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot on BBC was filmed here.

The steam train was powered by a boiler stoked by coal, and while I was examining its complicated mechanism up close, Colin, one of our older Australian friends, seemed surprised that I had never seen one before.  “That’s all we had in Australia when I was a boy,” he said.

 

The entire railway is a heritage site and only runs 3 miles, from Haverthwaite to Lakeside at the end of Lake Windermere, and its top speed is around 25 mph; so we watched scenery slip very slowly past the window.  Residents along the way were out in their yards and smiled and waved at us.

Lake Windermere is the largest lake in England, more than ten miles long, and it was a perfect day for cruising most of its length to Bowness-on-Windermere.  There were beautiful vacation homes along the shore.  

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A crew of rowers was flying by in a racing shell, skimming as easily as water striders on the surface. And a mile or two down the lake, Martha pointed out another skinny-dipper, this time in water that seemed a bit warmer than the North Sea at Gairloch three days ago.  Is this the usual morning ritual for especially hardy (and exhibitionist) Brits, I wondered?

Martin had driven our coach along the shore road while we were on the railroad and the lake, and we boarded it again as soon as we arrived in Bowness.  We drove the short distance to Grasmere and along the way Steve pointed out what is officially known as the smallest house in Britain.

Grasmere was the home of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), who was inspired by nature in his poetry, and it is easy to see why in a place like this.  He is buried in St. Oswald's church.  We went inside the church, and I was struck by the change-ringing ropes dangling from its tower, which I would have loved to have heard.

There was a beautiful daffodil garden nearby, in memory of one of Wordsworth’s famous poems, Daffodils:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

The final stanza of the well-known poem was inscribed on a stone near his grave.  Like many graveyards in England, it is a beautiful place, and I spent some time wandering there in my own pensive mood.

We ate lunch in the Grasmere Tea Garden, right on the river, and then stopped around the corner for a paper-wrapped package of Sarah Nelson's Grasmere Gingerbread, which is unhesitatingly called The Best Gingerbread in the World.  It was invented in 1854 by Ms. Norton, who came up with the recipe after considerable trial and error.  Spicy, sweet, and chewy, we snacked on it for the next two or three days, and we noticed several fellow-travelers opening their own packages on the coach..  

It was only a two-hour trip to our next stop, Liverpool, and our overnight stay at the Mercure right in the middle of the city, but it seemed like light years away from Wordsworth.  This was the home not only of the Beatles, but of Gerry and the Pacemakers, and we thought about their most famous song as we crossed the River Mersey:

Life goes on day after day
Hearts torn in every way
So ferry, cross the Mersey
'Cause this land's the place I love
And here I'll stay
People they rush everywhere
Each with their own secret care
So ferry, cross the Mersey
And always take me there
The place I love.

Our tour of the bustling port city began with the beautiful St. Andrews Church, with its soaring columns and high ceilings, and a magnificent organ so entirely different from the instruments played by the Pacemakers.

Its Whispering Arch is said not to have been deliberately designed for that purpose, but it did, indeed, function that way, a whisper across the room heard with eerie clarity, as if the speaker were an inch from your ear.

 

We also visited Matthew Street, famous for the many clubs, including The Cave, where the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and many other musicians of the 60s had played and first come to public attention.  Their names were engraved in bricks on a wall against which a statue of John Lennon himself slouched casually.

Of course, no visit to Liverpool would be complete without the obligatory visit to the statue of the "Fab Four" at Liverpool Pier Head.

For dinner, I decided to try that classic Indian-turned-British dish, Chicken Tikka Masala, which so many of my favorite British detectives have dined on at the end of, well, a hard day's night, and which does not seem to have yet reached the shores of this country.

What a long and winding road we have taken today, partly by steam train, partly by lake ferry, and partly by coach, from Windermere to Grasmere to Liverpool, from Wordsworth to Lennon and McCartney.