Lake District

Squeeze team was very good idea. To be honest, at the beginning I thought it wouldn't last for long. I already met many other groups and teams of people outside Slovakia, and it was usually just temporary friendship. Only few exceptions, like Tomas Deli, are disproving the rule. I hope there will be more! First meeting of squeeze team was a big success so we decided to continue the action. Before I start to tell the story I have to say one thing: there is no exact definition of squeeze team -basically anybody who is open-minded and willing-to-travel can become a member. This time me, Katalin and Martina (Czech HMC teacher) decided to go to England's treasure land called Lake District. The highest mountains and most beautiful lakes are situated in this middle west part of England. It used to be peace of land responsible for many quarrels and hassles between Dukes and Kings because everybody wanted to have it in their shire.
Once again we went for the option which killed two birds with one stone: rent a car, which provides transport and accommodation... First plan was to meet at Friday night and sleep at my place in Harrogate since it is relatively close to the park. But my housemaster didn't really like the idea of two women sleeping in boys boarding house -strangely one would be OK! And the fact that they are teachers didn't help either. So we adjusted our plans and girls travelled over night. I picked them up on Saturday morning at 6:40... good time for starting the day, but it didn't happened. We didn't leave Harrogate until as late as 10 am. You know: shower, breakfast, renting car, shopping in supermarket...
But we managed to leave, and decided to go through Yorkshire Dales (another national park, even closer to Harrogate) just to have nice views from the car, rather than just go on highway. The weather forecast for the whole week was horrible -as Martina said: "It's going to rain dogs and cats" which obviously induce amusement among native speakers... Surprisingly for country famous for rain and fog it didn't look like it at all. In fact at mid-day it was so nice that I decided -as the driver of the car- for the whole team that we should do our today's hiking now. No matter we were just in the middle of our way, somewhere in the Dales. I just stopped on first parking lot available and we hiked small hill. I'm not sure but it was called something like Cam Heat... anyway it was just a nice walk beyond the village. Parking was ridiculously expansive so spent there only 2 hours. At least we just made it during the dry and sunny part of the day, because the forecast was slowly fulfilling... for the rest of the day we just drove towards the Lake district discussing where exactly we wanna go. Finally we decided to go to Coninston and tomorow go for peak with curious name: Old man of Coninston. Since we came to the town quite early and the dogs finally begun to fall we ended up in local pub, discussing, chatting and having fun. It's like healing balm for the soul to feel the mutual understanding, sharing common opinions and coming from similar backgrounds. Everything sounded so meaningful, so wise, so warm and nice! I'm sure girls will agree with me, even though the rum might made it easier for them to feel all of this.
We were looking for the place to sleep for a while but found one parking lot without the usual sign "no over night parking", eventually. The rain on the body of the car is lovely tune for peaceful night -well if you are trained and used to sleep in little more uncomfy conditions than warm bed with teady bear next to you...
The good spell was dwelling upon us, because the whole night rain ceased in morning and before we start to hike the Old man there was no rain at all. Everything was nicely washed out and refreshed. The air was chili and ground soaked, but the whole scenery was marvelous. I already mentioned that the altitudes in England are not that high, but the actual appearance of the mountains is not that bad. Old man is only 800m high, and the hills around it are not much higher, since the highest mountain in England (Scaffel Pike) is only 978m. But the numbers are not everything. Mountains here have only few trees so there are great views almost everywhere and they look massive and solid. They look reddish and brownish due to plant called Header, grass, fallen leaves and earth. Now they were full of autumn colours, bright and vivid. We didn't managed to reach the summit, because it was like 7 hours hike and we had only 5 if we wanted to be safe for the bus from Leeds to London. Well, it doesn't matter, because after few ours we reached clouds and the visibility was getting poor, so it wouldn't make much difference to get to the top, except the fact that we conquered the peak -witch just a human vanity anyway... The point was to be outside, to chat and to refresh our minds from monotonic days in the System! And we fulfilled this point, so it was all fine. On the way back we already discussed the further development of squeeze team... so this weekend we are meeting in London!
pics will come soon