Ambleside YH

Ambleside Youth Hostel was busy when we arrived. The reception staff were friendly and helpful, told us where we could lock up our bikes and which room we’d be sleeping in.

On top of the cost of the room we had to pay £4 each for a cooked breakfast, £3 for a padlock and £2 for Martin’s towel. Actually when you add it all up, a Youth Hostel's not much cheaper than in a bed and breakfast, especially when you consider the fact that there were 9 beds in our room (all occupied at some point during the night) and there were only a couple of toilets and showers to accommodate the whole floor.

I was zonked, and if the aliens had invaded that night I’m not sure I’d have noticed. We locked up the bikes in the shed round the back, barely glancing at the sunset over the lake, and I got bed sheets because mine had gone missing. I then had a quick shower, took out my phone battery and charged it up (an external charger costs about £2 and is less likely to get nicked than the phone) and up the ladder into bed, while Martin got a padlock for the locker and chatted to a man from China who was youth hostelling around the UK.

Apparently we’d both drunk too much water on Day one, because both of us were up during the night. Everybody is so keen to stress that you shouldn’t get dehydrated, but it’s just as easy to go the other way (less dangerous though!) we were also thoroughly sick of cranberries, nuts and jelly babies, and Martin decided he was never going to touch High5 powdered carbohydrate mix again.

Next morning I was feeling much better. We had a choice of routes for today, and although neither of us wanted to appear ‘soft’ we both dropped enough hints to each other that the easier route would be better, that nobody lost face by being the first to back down. Sometimes it takes diplomacy to be a bloke on a man’s adventure.

They’ve got a clever system going in the youth hostel at Ambleside. We’d paid for our cooked breakfast the night before when we arrived, low on energy. After a good night’s sleep, however, I didn’t want a cooked breakfast of any sort, and Martin only wanted eggs and bacon. I made up for it by eating three bowls of cereal and spilling a fourth all over the floor. Plenty of fruit juice and toast, and we nicked some chocolate croissants for later.

Packed up and collected the bikes from the shed… and mucked around watching a kayaking lesson on the lake for an hour. We fixed my punctured tube, Martin showed me a better way to do it, filled our water reservoirs, and eventually swung our legs over the saddles at about half past ten, to continue our journey East.