Count Your Blessings #4 – Family Days Out

I love family days out. This one was with our usual family friend – Dave Brown. Dave was my Best Man and has been an integrated part of our family for nearly 20 years. Dave is 10 years older than Sue and I, but we share so much it makes absolutely no difference.

This family day was a walk around Tarn Hows, but starting from the Ambleside to Coniston road so we walked up the waterfalls to the Tarn. You just can’t beat the Lake District on a nice sunny day after rain, when the trees are green and the waterfalls are full. It’s beautiful (just look at the pictures).

We are so fortunate to be so close to somewhere so beautiful. The strange thing was, it was actually made more beautiful by the damage caused by the storms over the winter. The Lake District lost over 500,000 trees apparently. The way the trees were laid out in the Tarn was dramatic. And of course it gave Jonathan (and me) something to climb on and go discovering. There is something deep in the human spirit that drives us to discover; sometimes that discovery goes smaller and smaller, and sometimes it goes bigger and bigger. As I get older I find that I will either do one or the other.

I’ve been setting myself a little test to make sure I take it all in. When we go out for a walk I try to make sure that I take as many small pictures as big ones. Get into the beauty of that little flower, or leaf, or insect, and at the same time realise how huge that sky is and how tall that tree is. Jonathan and Emily are naturals at this; one second they can be telling you about the shape of a cloud and the next showing you a newt in the water that they’ve just discovered. Emily even noticed that the ‘dust’ on the edge of the Tarn wasn’t dust at all – it was thousands of dead insects with their wings glistening in the sunlight.

The discovery hadn’t finished there though; we even managed to round the day off by discovering a little Italian Restaurant down a little alleyway in Bowness-on-Windermere (of all places).

I love days of discovery.