Day 3 - Ullswater

Busy man that St Patrick...opens a boat shop too

 Monday 26th July 2010

Well if the clue in the name of this particular blog didn't give it away...today team Shiltonpig arrived in Ullswater. It is fair to say that by the 3rd day of our holiday and the 2nd day of rain things were starting to get on the nerves of Mr Shiltonpig. Come on lets face it....the British Isles are the best countries on the planet, and if it wasn't for the weather you would never need to go abroad....but the blinkin' weather spoils it. Then to top it all off for some reason our trusted geko 301 gps stopped working for a while near the lakes and for the life of me I cannot begin

Lovely weather for ducks

 to work out why.
Anyway all I am doing is moaning (and to be fair this is nothing to the amount Mr Shiltonpig did on this particular day), so lets begin on what started out as a bit of a damp squib and then turned out to be a beautiful highlight. Ullswater is probably team Shiltonpigs favourite lake, this is the 3rd time we have visited now and each time we have found something different to enjoy. We managed to complete a couple of caches before the gps went down, one of them near Patterdale was in a small concrete block....our favourite type of cache. Very clever little hide it was too...

Ours is better...go on admit it

 Next up we went to St Patricks well, (it is at this point I would like to point out to all our Irish readers, which after checking currently resides at 1 reader that St Patrick may be the patron saint of Ireland but in actual fact was born in England) the well was next to an ice cream shop and it seemed rude not to take advantage of them....didn't seem they liked tourists though.
For many years now we have tried to find the original spot of the famous photo that was taken at Ullswater, if you don't know what I mean then click here. There is in the photo to the left a meagre attempt to recreate the original one.

Get a shave Mr Shiltonpig...get a shave

 I think I speak for everyone when I say that ours is far better and we should in fact now be collecting the royalties. Afternoon came and the rain dried up and we went to Martindale on the other side of Ullswater....and a cache came up that could easily challenge for top 10 caches of the year....(you may start to get sick of this expression by the end of the holiday blogs and I apologise in advance...). The scenery was stunning, and the cache was behind a very old church in what can be described as in the middle of nowhere...and yet is still being used today. It was one of those moments where you breath is taken away...and not just because you are unfit and have eaten too much during the course of the day whilst walking uphill. Trying to imagine life in the 19th century was not hard standing where Mr Shiltonpig is standing simply because not much has changed in them there hills. In fact we like it that much that we recommend that you stop reading this blog and walk, run, drive, swim, fly there right now.

It is also worth noting that Mr Shiltonpig had his biggest fall since geocaching records first began, he was busy climbing up a rock face and it was very wet. Those evil ferns (see Day 2) were out in force again and this time were all wet, they arose to trip him up and he soon found himself tunbling down the hill, his whole life flashed before his eyes (mostly changing nappies and geocaching really...oh and eating). He thought his ankle was about to be broken....of course when he looked up all he saw was Mrs Shiltonpig laughing and jeering....sniff sniff...how cruel can partners be at times? Anyway we kissed and made up...and drove into the sunset (granted covered in clouds) together and drove to the next installment of team Shiltonpigs holiday.

Imagine you were here now...