Sunday - Hiking club trip to Coniston
I got up at 7am and drank some coffee. It was light and appeared to be clear. Walking onto campus there was not a cloud in the sky. I got to the underpass at 8:45am and was one of the first hikers there. There were lots of people going - two minibuses and two carloads of people. It took about an hour to get to Coniston, and we parked in a car park at the foot of a steep they had hoped to drive us up, but the engines in the (rented) minibuses were nowhere near powerful enough to go up it with everyone inside.

In the car park the options for walks were read out, and madly enough, I chose one that involved about 12km walking over 900 metres of elevation, over the Old Man of Coniston. This still gave us a decent amount of time in the pub. There was a crazier walk that was 16km and 1200m that I seem to recall involved going over the Old Man, along a ridge and over something else. It began to get gradually cloudier over the day.

We took a fairly gentle route, that wasn't too steep, and up to I would estimate about 500m high I didn't really think about how high it was. I was okay until someones dog went bounding past me, and I just stood still and hoped it went away, which thankfully it did. The views were quite spectacular, but unfortunatly it got cloudier and mistier. Of course, it go colder at that altitude, but I didn't really notice until I was near the top, and I drank from my water bottle and found it icy cold. There were patches of snow near the summit. The next scary bit was when we all had to climb over some rocks. They were quite large and a bit slippy, and you weren't that far from a very long drop. It was quite hard to watch from the other side, as you could see how close people were to falling a very long way. Most of the way from there on was fine, with only a few bits that were a little bit steep. By the time we got to the top it had misted over quite a lot, so the view wasn't as good as it might have been. You could see Heysham and Sellafield power stations still, so you could see quite far. Walking down was quite a bit too steep for my liking for quite a lot of it, but felt relatively safe. We stopped by a lake(?) most of the way down and sat down on some rocks for a bit. A couple of people skimmed stones. We then got bored of this and went off to find a pub.

We went to the Black Bull Inn in Coniston, and I had a pint of Bluebird Bitter, which was very nice. We sat around there until the crazy group got back and then I went with the first minibus load to go, so I don't know how long people stayed in the pub. On the way back we stopped at a chippie and got our tea. The staff in the chippie were surprised and confused that such large number of people came into their quiet little restaurant. I go a chip buttie, but quite regretted it because it didn't really fill me up.

Monday - back to 'reality'
This monday was beginning of week 6 of the term, so I had a new timetable. This means that now on monday I have a lecture at 10am and at 5pm. Unfortunately my housemate Liz has a 10am lecture on monday as well, so I had to get out of the shower quickly. On the upside, however, this meant that I got onto campus in time for morning prayer at 9:30am for the first time in quite a while. I got there before anyone else, but Katy, Steph and Melissa also came and we sat around chatting waiting for a chaplain to arrive until 9:40am. Not being in the Chaplaincy centre, and there no longer being a monday bible study, there were no bibles to hand, and so we just started doing prayers of intersession. I did my 10am lecture which was very simple being the first one in the course, and checked my email and then basically didn't have anything to do. I tried to read my notes from last half term but I couldn't really concentrate and so the day dragged on. I stayed on campus until my 5pm lecture, which was also easy. I then went to Sainsburys.
posted at 10:00:00 pm