This trip was actually initiated by my friend, Dinis. She told me that she really wanted to visit Lake District, a countryside surrounded by lakes (yeah, it’s obvious by its name, isn’t it?) Few months ago, Indonesian society arranged a trip to this place, but unfortunately I couldn’t go because of some reasons. This time I didn’t even think twice before I said “yes” to my friend’s invitation. I needed a refreshing. I needed a little break. So we set April 28th as the date of our trip. It was four of us – Dinis, Naina, Charlotte, and Me- who went for this trip.

We planned to catch the morning train from Newcastle to Carlisle. That morning, first bad luck happen to me. By the time we reached the Central Station, I realized that I left my railcard at home. This is a real disaster, since I paid for a student ticket and if (just in case) I couldn’t show my railcard when they asked for it, they were gonna fine me. So, to avoid the worst thing, I went back to my dorm to take my railcard. The result was, we missed the morning train and had to wait for the next train to Carlisle. First bad luck of the day! And I was the one to be blamed.

The journey to Carlisle took almost 2 hours, but the view along the railway was really nice. Lots of greenery stuffs. We reached Carlisle at about 11 am and took a walk around the city while waiting for our bus to Kenswick. Carlisle is a peaceful city, in my opinion. I mean, compared to Newcastle, this city is more “laid-back”. A typical UK rural city.

At about 12.30 pm we continued our journey to Kenswick by bus. We bought a one day pass for GBP 10. I have to mention this since that ticket was our savior for the rest of the day. We supposed to straightly catch another bus to Brockhole when we arrived in Kenswick. The silly thing happened. When we were just arrived in Kenswick, we saw that bus to Brockhole was about to leave. Okay, no chance for us to catch that bus. We need to wait for the next bus. But there’s always a good thing behind the bad thing. We had lunch in Kenswick. It was a pretty nice tuna melt toastie, by the way.

And the journey continued. We took the bus to Brockhole. I never imagine that it actually still quite far from Kenswick. We needed another 1.5 hour journey to reach Brockhole. Another silly thing happened. We missed the Brockhole bus stop. So we stopped at the next bus stop and the driver told us that actually he shouted and called for us when the bus stopped at Brockhole. Since we sit upstairs, we didn’t hear. And yeah, we missed the bus stop and had to walk down the road to Brockhole. Hooray! *thumbs down* Lucky us, there was an old man who told us that Brockhole is located about 2.5 miles from the place we stop and it was better for us to take any bus for there. Wow, he was like an angel in disguise. We followed his suggestion and waiting for the bus. About 10 minutes after, the bus came. Fyuhh..finally we reached Brockhole at 4 pm and that place will close at 5 pm. We only had an hour to enjoy the nice view there. The best one hour we’ve ever had. I felt the sensation of being faraway from the crowd and everything that bother my mind. Though for just a little while. We took some pictures. We enjoyed the weather. Thank God, it was sunny. The weather forecast predicted that it was going to be cloudy that day.

We went back at 5 pm and reached Kenswick at about 6 pm. We knew that the bus to Carlisle will leave at 6.25 pm so we decided to go inside the supermarket. We were wondering why there were no bus going to Carlisle, until we saw one left the bus station and the driver changed the destination to Carlisle. We were stunned at our place. That was the last bus to Carlisle that day. I thought we have to spend a night in Kenswick. That was the worst case scenario. My friend said : “let’s run! maybe we can catch the bus at the next stop”. I let out the maximum capacity of my energy to catch the bus, while suddenly my friend realized that the bus was straightly go to Carlisle. Haha…who want to run from Kenswick to Carlisle?!? We started to feel hopeless. Seriously, I was thinking to find a place to spend the night and went back to Newcastle on the next day. But then, about 30 minutes later, a bus came. My friend, Charlotte, explained our situation to the bus driver and asked him whether he had any suggestion for us on how to get back to Carlisle. Fortunately, he let us to go on the bus and he took us to Penrith. There was a bus leaving to Carlisle from Penrith. We were saved!

We arrived at Carlisle at 8ish and decided to have dinner there. Nando’s (our favorite restaurant) was located just across the railway station. Okay, so we went there and spent some time to chill out before continue our journey back to Newcastle. We caught the 9 pm train. I thought I could take a rest in the train. But then I found out that there were some football supporters who were sitting in another coach of our train, and they kept shouting during the journey. Okay, forget sleeping! When the train reached Hexham – which is actually already close to Newcastle – a group of people (most of them were heavily drunk) went into the train and they sit in the same coach with us. We were a little bit terrified, honestly. But, still, we were trying to stay cool. Hehe.

We reached home at 11 pm. Safe and sound. Really. God involved in our trip. He sent us those nice people. The old man and the bus driver. What an amazing journey. That was one of the experience of living abroad that I’ll always remember in the rest of my life.