Christmas Meet. The last meet of the
year.
It didn’t start amazingly well. The
week before the trip we found that we were lacking a driver for the gear van.
An awkward search for a driver followed, which ended after Kerri sent round an
e-mail to her drivers. We managed to recruit Alex to drive the van, who cam
well prepared .. even with a Rab down vest.
Once people were actually on the
buses we went our own ways up north. The M1 apparently had a 5 car accident so
was heavy on the traffic. We went via the A50 and encountered heavy tailbacks anyway
L.
Beyond massive traffic however the journey up was fairly uneventful. Arriving
and moving into the hut however was not. The swank van arrived first and joined
a fair selection of old boys that had decided to come on our trip. They arrived
to a hut with no gas. They just couldn’t get it to work. The minibuses arrived,
spread out by departure times from the rest stop we had near stoke. The Cole-er-coaster
arrived at roughly 1am and while most of us unpacked and started the social
drinking there was a few of us still trying to sort out the gas. After several
different attempts we decided that we would ring the hut warden on the Saturday
morning. Bed-times varied but with the old boys staying up for most of the
night not many people got a good night’s sleep. Some people got under an hour ….
Saturday
For most people the day started at
8.30. For some of us it started at 7. For the unlucky the night rolled into the
day. From about 7.30 we attempted to get into contact with the hut warden. The phone
was never picked up and the answerphone was full. Annoyingly after 30-45
minutes of attempting slightly sporadically to phone the warden, we tried the
deputy warden, who answered on the first attempt. She said she would come as
soon as she could so we started getting people ready for the day. It took a
while and we were practically ready to go when she arrived. We decided it would
be better to just leave and give everyone some space. While Brad, Lally, Ali,
Ollie, Inga and Lianne stayed behind to hopefully cook, the rest of us left for
Scout Crag.
What transpired in the hut to my
knowledge is that no one knew what was wrong with the gas. Radiators were
working but the cookers were not. The club that owns the hut gave us some gas
cookers and use of an oven in another hut. Using these, our lovely Christmas dinner
was cooked and prepared for our arrival.
Scout crag was a pain to get to as
we went via a small steep country road. Once we got there however we found that
the walk-in was surprisingly short. We set up 4 top ropes and let people play
around. The routes varied in difficulty and while the guidebook said the
hardest was MVS, the routes felt a bit harder than they were graded. One route
was graded Severe but felt much closer to VS … a bit of a difference. The
majority of the routes were tried and a lot of mincing occurred, as is to be
expected of a Christmas meet. Cole, Amy and Lidiya went for a walk and finished
the day in the pub. As it got to 2/3 ish we packed up and went back to the
minibuses. With no phone signal and no sign of the necessary bus driver Cole we
wondered what to do. With some lorry webbing and a nice row of trees Tanner set
up a slackline for people to try. We gave it a go and had a bit of fun for half
an hour or so before we all piled on the bus and went to Ambleside to kill more
time.
We all pretty much started in
Epicentre to my knowledge, however I got talking with the guy down by the
climbing gear and stayed for a lot longer. There were a few people that went to
coffee shops but overall the atmosphere was of a tired group that wanted to
relax.
We arrived back at the hut, entered
through the side door and milled around until the food was ready. The meal was
served to the hungry masses and we dined in what I would like to say was style
but I’m not sure I can say that. After
the meal I was coerced into giving a small speech but was interrupted by Amy who
gave me a crown and christened me the clusterfuck king. I guess I know what my legacy is …
I shall skip over the clean-up of
the meal and move on to the arrival of the father shotmas and his fairy
shotmother. Shots of Sambuca and tequila were dispensed and everyone started to
break out their drinks. Various drinking games were played and the merriness continued
until late into the night. Based on my state of inebriation I went to bed early
at about 1. This may have been a clever idea as the possible hangover did not
occur.
Sunday
Sunday started slowly as many people
were tired/hungover. Once people properly began to move though stuff was packed
up and I tried to work out what people were to do. With Harry and Brad running
a mountain walk up Hellvelyn the group numbers were more favourable. About half
of our party wanted to do the walk. The snow was Cole ran a small trip to the Ambleside
wall which a few people did. The rest of us went to the Langdale Boulders to
try our hand at Lake District bouldering.
The easy problems were easy, the hard problems were nails and the
middling difficulty seemed incredibly beta-specific. If you has the right
sequence the holds were good and you could normally do it, but if you had the
wrong sequence or weren’t sure where the next hold was then you would struggle
quite badly. We muddied the mats up trying some problems on the lower boulder
before moving up a bit and increasing the mince %. Jim continued trying the
pocket problem (V5), having got to the pocket before but not managing to get
his right foot on a good hold. Unfortunately despite a lot of effort over many
attempts throughout the day he was unsuccessful. The overall attitude was quite relaxed and
banterous but people sent quite nicely. Most of us got a few of the V1’s which
is pretty impressive given the night before and the relative inexperience that
most of us had. Even if people didn’t actually send they still attempted and
tried hard over the day.
We were picked up by Cole and taken
back to the hut to clean and empty it. It took longer than I would have wanted
but it could have taken longer so I’m happy. We cleaned out the hut and filled
the buses. The trip back was again uneventful barring Marc being dropped off at
Preston and the return of Bus Wars. Unfortunately it seemed that it was just
the Cole-er-coaster that was taking part in the wars.
The buses all got back safe and
sound after a quick stop in Keele. Everyone was dropped off and we packed up
and left.
As this is probably the last post of
the year .. have a good one and enjoy your Christmas/new year. Catch you on the
flip-side
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