Phew! I’m glad to still be alive today !

 Saturday 1483 – 25th February 2012

If you are following my other blog “Helen’s Photomania ” you will have read that I gave myself a bit of a scare with some flood water on Wednesday…  If you haven’t seen it take a look here

Yesterday I did something which scared me so much I thought I was going to have a heart attack that’s if I didn’t drive over the edge of a precipice first !!  So today I am very glad to be alive. So glad in fact that today I climbed to a waterfall along a rather precipitous path!! ( I didn’t know it was going to be precipitous! ) What is wrong with me !!  Do I have a death wish or something??

What makes us human beings do things that we know are going to scare us half to death? Is it because we don’t get enough of this adrenalin producing excitement in our everyday lives?  Or is it because we want to prove something to ourselves?

Or is it just because we are foolish and think we won’t be as scared of something now as we used to be? Or suddenly like something we’ve never liked before.  A sort of test for ourselves,  a bit like deciding to try garlic again and discovering you like it after years of “knowing” you didn’t. Okay not a great analogy but you know what I mean !

Anyway to go back to what I did yesterday.

I’m on holiday at the moment. In Cumbria in the North West of England, the area known as the lake district for obvious reasons… lots of lakes. Where you have lakes you often have mountains; in this case the Cumbrian Mountains.

For whatever reason…the challenge?? ..because I thought it was sure to be very scenic and photogenic?  I decided to go on the shortcut from Ravenglass on the coast to Ambleside via the Hardknott and Wrynose passes. The shortcut!! it would only be a shortcut if you were going by helicopter!

The Hardknott pass in particular  is known to have stretches of road ( lots of them as it turns out !!) where the gradient is 1: 3 that means it drops/rises 1 unit  in each 3… in layman’s turn that is TERRIFYING … and is the maximum slope allowed for roads,

The photo below looks innocuous enough doesn’t it but look carefully…that zig zig line is the road I drove down, the 1:3 road. So this is taken between passes! You can see a tiny car at the far right edge of the photo approaching the bottom 3rd of the pass. You can also see that the road looks very wet.. It was,  there was a lot of water running down the road in several places. What it doesn’t show is how windy it was!

Now I have driven on scary roads before, notably in Madeira and Tobago, but nothing like this. This was something else. I have never been so scared in all my life and once you’re on that pass there’s no going back. You can’t decide half way up you don’t like it and want to go back down and anyway going down is even worse than going up!

But… I did get some photographs… no not when I was driving !!  There is a flat-ish bit in between the 2 passes and I could think of no better way to regain my sanity or at least enough of it to tackle the 2^nd pass so I took some photographs and here are just 3 to give you an idea. ( some sheep ones will feature on Photomania I’m sure ! )

Fast moving clouds and shafts of light.

 .

.

.

.

Apparently the Hardknott Pass shares the title of the Steepest Road in England – you can read about it here and both Hardknott and Wrynose passes are 393 m (1,289 ft) at the top. YIKES !

Now you might well ask why I didn’t read that before I drove the road. Believe me I have asked myself that many, many times and if I had read it I doubt very much that I would have attempted it but then I wouldn’t have taken these photos or had this tale to tell !!

I think I could have coped with that !

This to my daughter – Katy if you come to the Lake District this is one thing you most definitely do NOT want to do !!

 I would NEVER do it again and I mean you couldn’t say, pay or do anything that would make me do it again….NO WAY !!  I think you are probably getting my drift

Anyway that was Friday. Today -Saturday -I spent a glorious couple of hours of solitude on the limestone pavement at Farleton ( photos to come on Photomania at a later date) , photographed some more sheep,(ditto)  climbed up a steep precarious path to the Aira Force waterfall… it was hardly worth it !! and visited Ullswater lake ( it was raining by then) .

On the drive back to my apartment I called in to Cartmel for a piece of their renowned Sticky Toffee Pudding with ice-cream; a delicious (and well deserved !)  end to the day. I chose blood orange tea to accompany it… Yum Yum !

.

You can see more of my Cumbrian photos on Photomania from 21st Feb 2012 probably until I run out of them!!

.

Glad to be alive Saturday Girl saying goodbye until next week. I’ll be keeping my feet firmly on flatter ground until then !

Christmas Eve in Venice

Saturday 1492 – 24th Dec 2011 – Christmas Eve.

Here I am in Venice again visiting my daughter for Christmas. She goes home on the 28th Dec so this will be my last time. The immediate family is here - me, my daughter, her partner and my son.

The 3 of them took themselves off to Padua this morning to visit the Scrovegni chapel with its Giotto Frescos.  I decided not to go as I wanted to visit Cimitero -St Michele - the Cemetery Island just off the main Islands of Venice.  This is my 6th visit to Venice and I have never been…always intended to go but never quite made it and it has a curious fascination. The island is studded with Dark Cypress trees and the whole is surrounded by a high Terracotta wall and there are some famous foreigners buried there like Ezra pound and Sergei Diaghilev.

As well as individual and family graves there are many remembrance walls like the one below with name plaques and often photos; some are well looked after, others less so. The upper ones are reached by wheeled ladders reminiscent of those in old libraries.

This seemed like a good day to go as Christmas isn’t just about being with family or friends it’s also a time for remembering those family and friends who are no longer with us.  I am not at all religious and don’t believe in God but if I’m in a religious building I still find myself lighting a candle and thinking about those who are gone. This Christmas eve was no exception. In the little church on St Michele I lit candles and in particular thought of my late father Bert who died when I was 17, my brother Geoff who died aged 53,  my ex husband Sydney at 59, his father Jim in his 90′s and  my friend’s daughter Laura who died way too young in her early teens. 

I took a photo of the candles and here they are in remembrance of all those who are no longer here.

 

Later in the day my daughter, her partner and I decided we’d go to midnight Mass at Basilica San Marco in St Mark’s square ( well really my daughter decided ! ) – I had reservations because as I mentioned I’m not at all religious (neither are they) but this was sold to me as a once in a lifetime opportunity.  We arrived a little after 11 pm and my daughter had said it would all be over at 12… not so !

We tucked ourselves into a corner sitting on a stone seat against the outer wall . My daughter and her partner decided they’d like to go and stand nearer the middle so they could see more. I was happy to stay where I was and took a few photos before the service started, like the Ascension Dome pictured below with its 13th Century mosaics.

Shortly after they went a very old man came over to my corner and I offered him my seat as no-one else looked as though they were going to;  after all I’d only be standing until 12 !! Ha! Ha!

The service started and went on and on (and on !)  in Italian, of course, so I didn’t have a clue what was being said and could see very little of what was happening ( the choir and incense were good though!) At 12.40 a.m I decided I’d had enough ( I’m not great at standing as I have a bad ankle and I was frozen) and sent a text to my daughter’s partner to say I was going to catch a Vaporetto (water bus) back to the apartment. When I got to the Vaporetto stand I discovered there were going to be no boats! so text to say I was on my way back to the Basilica to wait for my daughter and her partner to come out.

 No reply!  I was tempted just to walk back but didn’t think it would be a great idea to walk halfway across Venice on my own at 1 a.m carrying some very expensive camera equipment.

They eventually emerged at 1.20 a.m, all delighted that they hadn’t been standing at all but had  been ushered to seats close to the altar and the centre of the action ! I was spitting feathers by this time  and confess I wasn’t the best of company on the 1/2hr or so walk home ! !  Ho Hum !

There’s no moral to this story – it’s just a fact of life that not everything goes according to plan ( in fact most things don’t! )

I’ll leave you with a photo of a large house on the Grand Canal all lit up for Christmas with a rather pretty moving snowflake scene.

 

Seasons Greetings to you all from the Saturday Girl.  ‘Til next week .. Ciao, Ciao.

P.s – You can see my other posts about Venice here Departures and Arrivals and here Acqua Alta ,Umbrellas and Wellies