Rydal Caves: Daring Darkness and Danger

While driving a boat slowly around an English lake is more serene than exciting to adults, for a little girl, getting behind the wheel to be in control of a motorized vehicle was a chance to do something she'd only seen others do.  We kept her from getting too crazy, of course, making sure she stayed well clear of other boats.

Admittedly, I sometimes led my own kids a little closer to the edge sometimes, such as when Amy as a little girl missed a turn skiing down a bunny hill in Big Sky that had her literally hanging off a cliff.  Okay, she wasn't setting a downhill record for speed at the time, and it wasn't straight down ice without fluffy snow and bushes to slow her decent, so she was never in danger of dying, but it was still a jolt for us.  Amy was smiling the whole time as her teen-aged cousin Brooks quickly took off his skis and climbed down to pull her back up, but I think it freaked her older sister Gina out a bit, as it did the adults.

When Gina was a toddler and couldn't swim, she would jump off the safe patio into my arms in the swimming pool, trusting my invitation to "Fly to me, my chickadee," a game the other children loved, too.

The kids all enjoyed white water rafting in inner tubes through shallow rivers where our rumps would occasionally bump into hidden rocks.  Once on a camping trip at La Jolla Indian Reservation, I told Jay we would never encounter anything dangerous on our inner tube trip through some rapids, and that the water would always be shallow enough to stand with our heads well above the water should things go awry.

There turned out to be a five-foot waterfall drop with an unusually deep hole at the bottom in our future.  We shot off the waterfall, and instead of staying parallel to the ground as we flew forward like in a cartoon, our tube tipped down with the contour of the water surface and submarined, sending little Jay off the tube and down into the river's only deep spot.  While he came out unharmed, we both will remember that as a truly frightening experience.

Fortunately, we always lived to tell the tales of our exciting adventures.

On the road from Windermere back to Grasmere, there's a recommended hike to Rydal Caves that requires some daring-do for rock climbing and then entering dark caves where we really didn't know what we might find.  We decided to take that adventure together.

Because we were close to Beatrix Potter's Cottage, a place to which Sasha has a special connection from her own childhood memories that she wanted to visit, the group in the car drove to the other side of the lake before heading to the caves.

The photos revealed a beautiful estate that I'm sure Gina and I would have also enjoyed seeing.

Instead, Gina and I hopped back on the bus (all-day tickets were the same price as round trip, so we could actually make stops wherever we wanted) to enjoy another ride with narration, this time to the Badger Bar, which served as a landmark near the Rydal Caves trail head.

Glen Rothay's Badger Bar is an authentic inn and pub dating from 1624.

It occurred to me that our ancestor Matthew Strickland I could very well have spent the night or had an ale for-the-road there on their way to America.

While the ales sounded tempting, Gina and I went with cappuccinos, because it was morning back in the USA, and besides we'd had ale an hour earlier at The Flying Pig.

About the time we finished our hot treats, the others arrived, and we were off across the street to hike into the unknown.

It's a lovely trail, one that's not terribly challenging but enough of a hike to get our hearts pumping.

A flurry of rain had us concerned, but after we scurried to shelter under some trees, that soon dissipated.

When we reached the caves, getting inside required a bit of rock climbing.  Jay made his way up first and extended his hand to help others, including myself.  Emma's contortionist stretches from Circus School and gymnastics paid off to help her cover the long spans between toeholds more suited to adults and enable Uncle Jay to help her up that last steep part.

Getting back out of the caves created other challenges that we all overcame.

The caves themselves were dark, and as I said, none of us knew what might be inside.

Bats?  Spiders?  Yetis?

Way up on top, you can see the intrepid cavers standing victorious above it.

As it turned out, pretty much all we saw were rock walls and accumulated rain water that we tried to avoid so as not to soak our feet.

We subsequently climbed atop the hilltops above the caves and enjoyed the views.

On the hike back, Emma frequently split off the trail to scale other rock faces.

She's looking forward to doing some more mountain hikes with her parents back home in Pennsylvania and perhaps on trips to national parks in America.

Hiking in national parks is already a passion for Gina and Laszlo.

The rest of us roamed back to the Badger Bar, where Jay's car was parked.

Julie and Gina decided to catch the bus back to Grasmere, while the rest of us had a half pint of delicious local pale ale in the Badger Bar.  Actually, Emma didn't have any ale, but she was delightful company, as usual.

Driving home after savoring the ambiance of the pub, we saw Julie and Gina walking along the narrow road.

I knew immediately we needed to drop the others in town and double back to get them, because they had at least a couple of miles to go, and the narrow road with brisk, two-way traffic was really was no place for pedestrians.

We exchanged texts with Gina to set up a meeting point.  It turned out they had missed the bus by five minutes and decided to walk to the next stop, but I'm not sure there would have been one before Grasmere village.

That evening, we went back to the Good Sport Taproom where we'd tried to go on the first night.  We barely made it in before the kitchen was scheudled to close for the evening.  It took a while for some to decide what they wanted, and when we finally put the order in, we found out the cooks didn't have the chicken for Julie's meal.  Fortunately, they had a chicken nuggets on the kids menu, and that suited Julie just fine.

I had fish and chips, as I often do in pubs, and the huge meal with mashed peas was fantastic.  Who are these people that say British food is ghastly?

That night back home, we played a rousing game of Monopoly, much to the delight of Emma.