June 27, Friday

Some photos of the converted barn duplex we’re renting.  The right side is the one rented out; the owner lives on the left.

View of back yard.

It’s right in the middle of farm land.

View out the living room window, and Holden doing his favorite thing … ignoring fabulous views in favor of playing games on his iPad.  He’s not allowed on it during the day, so as soon as we get back from our daily activities and settle in for the evening, he hits it hard.

The owner baked us fresh scones, with little pots of cream, jam, marmalade, and butter.

We had planned to spend the morning doing a treetop adventure, but when we got there discovered you have to make advance reservations.  They didn’t have space for us, so we bought tickets for tomorrow morning.  We needed a Plan B for the day, so we drove to nearby Bowness-on-Windermere to wander around.  It’s a resort area on Lake Windermere and a big tourist draw.

Time for tea and cakes.

Down by the water we found birds.  Of course we had to stop.  In this photo, Josie has no food for them, but is holding out her hand in hopes that she can trick one of them into getting close.  It didn’t work.  The birds are pretty savvy.

That boat had a live brass band playing music.  It created quite a festive atmosphere.

In this photo, up in the corner you can see a man in a red shirt giving Josie bird food.  He was the nicest guy.  He had a big bag of bird seed and shared it with the kids.  They got to feed birds for a good 20 minutes because of him.

Then a tourist boat full of Asians docked.  They were really pushy and chased off (literally!) all the birds.  They ran right into the flock like 2-year old kids and tried to catch them.  It ruined everyone’s good time.  Then this woman (photo below) spotted Holden and grabbed him to be her “Look!  A real live English boy!” picture.  She didn’t speak English and didn’t bother with niceties like asking permission, but Holden was a really good sport about it.  Adam was sitting on a bench next to an English lady who had been chatting with him and knew perfectly well that Holden was American and not English.  She was cracking up over the whole spectacle.

I missed it all, because, as you can see, a swan had my full attention.  (That’s me hunkered down in the grey coat and wool hat.  This swan let me groom her feathers, so I was obliging.)

The tourist group moved on, and the birds came back.

Another example of how these tourist groups travel around in herds.  If you love crowds, then a tour just might be for you — you get to travel with your own mob.  You get to do everything in a crowd.

Street scene in Kendal, a town on our way back to the barn cottage.  They have a big pedestrian mall that was fun to walk down.  We stopped here for a late lunch.

Kendal has an old chocolate factory.  It’s a tea room and shop now (no getting to see the facility) but we were able to buy some little treats.  Three chocolate hedgehogs and one chocolate mouse.  They were pretty good, but nothing holds a candle to the chocolate available in Switzerland.

June 28, Saturday

At 4:00 a.m. Josie woke me up.  “I can’t sleep because a sheep is baaing right outside my window.”  I told her to go lay down and close her eyes and try to rest anyway.  About ten minutes later, she padded back in.  “Now there’s a whole bunch of them, plus chickens.  I can’t sleep.”

Such is farm life!  Animals get up with the sun and want fed.  Sheep baaing, cows mooing, roosters crowing, crows cawing, songbirds singing … it all begins at 4:00 a.m.  It’s really loud, too.  I don’t mind the animals noises, but it ruined Josie’s morning.  What did ruin my morning was Josie repeatedly coming into my room to complain about it.  The final straw was when she poked my arm and said, “Wake up, Mama!  Are you awake? I’m going to use your bathroom because I don’t want to wake Holden up by flushing the toilet in our bathroom.”

“Just use your bathroom and don’t come in here again!”  She didn’t, but I don’t think either of us ever went back to sleep.

We had reservations at 10:00 a.m. for the Treetop Trek.  They’ve built “elements” between the trees — each element is a different type of wobbly bridge or tightrope, etc. — the kind of things Indiana Jones would have to use to cross deadly ravines.  You are harnessed to an overhead cable so you can’t fall, but it’s still really scary to climb around up there.

Here we are getting our harnesses on.

Starting out with the first (and easiest) element.  This picture doesn’t show how high up we were.  The lowest elements were 5 meters (16 feet) above ground, and the highest ones were 17 meters (55 feet) up.  

Isabella about to tackle one of the wobbly bridges.

Tightrope crossing.  Those ropes hanging down like vines were your only means of trying to stabilize yourself.  Alternatively, one could attempt a Tarzan swinging crossing, but that was so tough nobody could do it.

Bad photo quality taken with an iPhone, but here is me making that same crossing.  Josie is standing on the platform in front of me.

Next bridge: ropes and logs.  Josie is in the middle. You have to look closely.

The trek concludes with “the epic 250m Triple Zip wire.”

After the adventure, it was time for lunch in nearby Ambleside.  We’ve noticed in the photos that Josie looks like this in a lot of restaurants.  Waiting for food is the most boring part of her day.

Walking around Ambleside.  There is no shortage of stone in England, it seems.

Stott Park Bobbin Mill was built in 1835 and is the only remaining bobbin mill left in England.  It closed in 1971 when industries shifted from using wood to using plastic for things like bobbins.  The mill was saved by the Department of Environment and was turned into a working museum in 1983.  All the old machinery is still used for demonstrations.

This mill was originally powered by water, then switched to steam, and then eventually electricity.

Walking around the grounds.

The kids were given an opportunity to try a boring machine (as in a machine that bores holes in wood) that was operated by two people:  one person operating the spinning bit and wood (Isabella) and the other turning the hand crank to power it (Holden.)  This proved to be so difficult they couldn’t even get the bit close enough to the chunk of wood to start the boring process.  Their chunk of wood remained hole-less.

Time for dress-up in old-timey clothes!  The logs behind Josie are cut and stacked to dry.  They take about 12 months to get dry enough to work with.  This mill utilized child labor, mostly orphans, starting around age 8.  They lived in a big dorm building on the property.  They were paid wages, but the curator said “It wasn’t nearly enough to live on.”  Kids did pretty much every job that didn’t require a grown man’s strength.

We have a photo almost exactly like this from almost exactly one year ago.  I was braiding Isabella’s hair at the Grand Canyon last summer.  She was a lot shorter then.

Trying on hats.

Drying wood, and big baskets used to collect and transfer the bobbins at various stages of progress.

Lathes.  These were so dangerous to operate that only adults were allowed to work them.  Workers had to keep track of how many bobbins they produced in a shift because they were paid by the piece.  Workers were responsible for maintaining their machines, and if one broke down they had to fix it and lose a day’s wages in the process.  There was a blacksmith forge on the premises and workers had to learn that trade, as well.  This was a very high-paying job that was much sought-after.  The positions only became available when someone died, because men who were lucky enough to get a lathe position never gave it up.  An apprentice may have to wait 30 years for his chance.

Just a small pile of shavings generated during demonstrations of one of the lathes.  During peak production, they had to keep the doors open at all times because the fine dust was highly flammable and could explode from a mere static charge.  (This happened to other mills in the area, but never this one.)  That made for very cold working conditions in this building.  The men would let the shavings pile up to their waists for warmth.

Josie and the other little girl on the tour were selected to demonstrate how the finished bobbins were cleaned.  When they arrive on the finishing floor, they are covered in sawdust.  The mill employed little kids (7 and 8 year olds) to clean them.  A work shift was 12 hours.

A selection of products made in this very mill over the years.

As we were leaving the Bobbin Mill, Holden remarked, “That was actually pretty interesting.”  Success!!

Time for another tea/treat break.  We found a really neat hotel called The Swan that had a tea room and tables right on the river.  The kids were feeling grateful that they don’t have to work 12 hours a day for slave wages and live in an orphanage.

Adam is reading a book called The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer.  In it, Mortimer points out that the median age of an English citizen today is about 38 (half younger than 38, half older.)  In the 14th century, the median age was 21.

[excerpt]  “This preponderance of young people leads to social differences in every community and field of activity. The average man or woman in the medieval street has seventeen years’ less experience to draw on in every aspect of their lives.  He or she has many fewer elders to ask for advice.  When you consider that societies with youthful populations are more violent, tend to be supportive of slavery, and see nothing wrong in brutal combats in which men fight to the death for the sake of entertainment, you realize that society has changed fundamentally.”

“It is generally said that medieval men are in their prime in their twenties, mature in their thirties and growing old in their forties.  This means that men have to take on responsibility at a relatively young age.  In some towns citizens as young as twelve can serve on juries.  Leaders in their twenties are trusted and considered deserving of respect…. When people declare that ‘children have to grow up so quickly these days’, they should pause and reflect on this fact.  Medieval boys are expected to work from the age of seven and can be hanged for theft at the same age.”

Basically, the entire society was just a bunch of uneducated kids with no wisdom, no supervision, and an expectation of never living much past 50 years in the best of circumstances.  That actually does explain somewhat why society was so brutal back then.

This duck and her adorable babies swam up and begged for crumbs of our scones.

Massive cups of hot chocolate for the kids, with a tower of marshmallows and cream, and decorated with malted milk balls.  They all three declared it the best hot chocolate they’ve had this summer.  Down in the corner, my “treat.”  It was roasted beets with lentils and mustard, garnished with garlic sticks.

Isabella back at the house, faithfully keeping up with her friends.  She doesn’t want to miss anything while she’s away.

 June 29, Sunday

The sheep in the back field that “baaaaaa” into Josie’s window each morning.

Today was mostly a driving day, but we did stop in Castleton for lunch and to visit Peveril Castle.  This neat little pub served a very nice rabbit pie.

Picture of Adam having fun.  He always looks like this, but swears he’s enjoying himself immensely.  We have a hard time believing him.  If you painted him green and put trumpets on his ears, he’d be Shrek.

Peveril Castle is at the top of a very steep hill.  That made it strategically a great location because they had 360° views of the entire valley and were hard to attack.  It was a very arduous walk, though.  Even the people in clearly great shape were huffing and puffing by the time they got to the top.

This castle was supposed to protect the King’s forest holdings, but from I gathered, it was more or less a place for petty tyrants with no supervision or accountability to extort money from farmers and peasants, and in general make life a nightmare for the folks living in the valley.  There was a huge area walled off in front of the castle for confiscated sheep — meaning that whomever was in charge of the castle could just go into fields and steal sheep whenever they felt like it.  They would either claim it was for “taxes” (best scenario for the farmer) or make up some violation on the farmer’s part.  That was way worse and could end in a farmer’s entire property being confiscated, and sometimes jail time.

Back in 1988, my family took a trip across the United States that became known in the family lore as The Trip From Hell.  My dad’s chief complaint was that my brother and I didn’t enjoy visiting all the historic Civil War battlefields and museums.  By the time we’d seen a dozen of them, Brian and I started electing to sit in the car rather than trek across yet another field to look at a pile of canon balls.  My dad was incensed.  He still talks about how ungrateful and stupid we were to this day.

Adam and I are getting a taste of that medicine on this trip.  We hiked up that great hill to this castle that was originally built shortly after 1066 by William the Conquerer’s best buddy (William Peveril) and the kids decided to sit on a bench.  The castle is right behind them and here they sit, bored and whining about being tired.

And when I say the castle is right behind them, I mean it’s right behind them.  They could barely be troubled to turn their heads to look at it, much less walk up the hill and poke around in the ruins.  Holden is even taking an old man nap.  Unbelievable.

Adam and I went up in the tower and spied on the kids from above.  There they are, still sitting on a bench.

This valley directly behind the castle is called Cave Dale.  It was the filming location for the scene in The Princess Bride where Buttercup shoves the Dread Pirate Roberts down a hill and realizes he is really her beloved Westley.  (Clip here.)

We didn’t know this tidbit until we got to our house later in the afternoon and found it mentioned on the internet.  We didn’t do the Cave Dale hike, so we’re considering going back in the next few days.  Isabella wants to (safely!) roll down the hill and yell “As you wiiiiiiish!”  Now she’s interested.  Context makes a world of difference!

Some of the original stone facing is still there.

Back in town, we found a Land Rover in rougher shape than ours.  People have clearly been living in it for weeks.