August 27, 2024: It wasn't raining when I woke up, but it looked like it had recently. And, more importantly, the weather forecast called for horrible weather all day long. But! I had a plan! Which was to take a zero day. And, I even found an activity which seemed like it would be a lot fun--take a tour of the Honister Slate Mine.
Rather than walking all the way back to the mine, which I'd either have to do on a road busy with traffic or on the Coast to Coast trail which I knew from yesterday was positively flooded with water and up a big hill. Instead, I decided to take the bus which, according to Google, would pick me up from the closest bus stop at precisely 8:32am.
The torrential rains today created seemingly hundreds of streams and waterfalls in the mountains! |
I thought the bus stop was practically right in front of the hostel, but it turned out it was a 10-15 minute walk away. Definitely a lot further away than I expected, but not a big deal either. Especially since it wasn't even raining. Not yet, at least!
However, when I arrived at the bus stop, the schedule there said the bus wouldn't come by until 8:47am. Guess Google got that wrong. There was a bench nearby in a covered area so I sat down there, and just in time since it started sprinkling just as I arrived.
But then, at precisely 8:32am, a bus flew by along the road without even slowing down. I missed the bus?! What the heck is going on? That wasn't on the posted schedule at all! This is one of those stops that you have to wave down for the bus to stop, but it came by so unexpectedly, I was still sitting on a bench across the intersection before I even had a chance to jump up and wave the bus down.
I was uncertain what to do now. Was there still a bus coming at 8:47? Should I just start walking to the slate mine? I decided to wait the extra 15 minutes to see what happened. I also decided to wait at the actual bus stop and not use the bench across the intersection so if it came by early, I would be positioned to wave it down. Unfortunately, because it started raining, I had to stand in the rain. Bleh. At least I had an umbrella to keep me mostly dry.
And just like the schedule predicted, a bus arrived precisely at 8:47. I wave it down, paid the two pounds with a credit card, and arrived at the mine a few stops later. I never did figure out what that earlier bus was for or where it went.
The next available open spot for a tour wasn't until 10:30, so I waited in the cafe area for an hour killing time by playing on my phone. This was doubly good for me because there was free wifi available. For some reason, I had been unable to connect to the Internet at the hostel and I still had no cell phone signal, so this was the first time I could get online since yesterday morning.
In the meantime, the rain grew increasingly heavy, so much so that a creek started flowing between the main entrance and the gift shop where the tour started. Keep in mind, this is not where a creek is supposed to flow. It's actually the path between the main entrance and the gift shop, over a covered walkway. I was pretty certain that water wasn't supposed to flowing there at all, and it wasn't when I first arrived. It had changed dramatically in the hour I was waiting, however.
I'm ready to head underground! |
Anyhow, it was finally time for my tour, provided by Donald. The actual mine was a short ride away, so after the safety briefing and giving us hard hats and headlamps, we boarded a bus that took us a quick 5-minute ride down a gravel road to a mine entrance. The five seconds it took to walk from the protected confines of a roof to the bus was through a torrential downpour. The rain was heavy. Biblical, even!
Apparently, the bus usually takes people all the way to the mine entrance, but because of the rain, they were afraid the bus might have trouble navigating the last slope to the actual entrance, so they stopped the bus short and had us walk the rest of the way. Through the torrential downpour.
Before heading out into the rain, Donald told us that he usually told some stories at the entrance but because it was raining so hard, we'd just go straight in to escape the rain and he'd tell the stories there. So that's what we did.
Bus ride from the visitor center to the mine |
The mine tour was similar to every other mine tour I'd ever done, except this time the walls were covered in slate rather than other materials. I still enjoyed it, however, and I enjoyed learning a bit about the mining history of the area. This mine is active, although the active portion must be in another location since the area we were in was not in active use.
About halfway through the tour, one of the other employees of the mine caught up with us in the mine to tell Donald that the bus that we were to take back to the visitor enter had gotten "stuck" and that they were working on it. Great.... I wondered how long we would be stuck out here. I had no problem just walking back to the visitor center. It wasn't really that far away, but the rain would certainly make the experience less enjoyable.
Exploring the mine! |
At the end of the tour, we stood around near the exit for a bit but didn't go out due to the rain. I figured Donald was still waiting for word about when the bus was ready to pick us up again, and eventually he got word that the bus was ready. We poured out of the mine into the rain and quickly walked to the bus which appeared to be free from wherever it had gotten stuck earlier.
The mine tour was over, but the adventure was not quite over. I checked the scheduled time for the bus back to the hostel. I definitely did not want to walk back in this torrential downpour!
The buses only ran every couple of hours, so I had the better part of an hour to wait around in the cafe area before it was scheduled to arrive. By now, the place was packed with people waiting for their mine tours. I had arrived relatively early in the morning before the crowds, but the place was positively claustrophobic with people now! And because of the heavy rain, everyone was inside rather than checking out all the slate sculptures and artwork located around the outside.
About 10 minutes before the bus was scheduled to arrived, I moved from the inside to the covered porch out front to wait for the bus. If it arrived early, I wanted to see it and flag it down! If I missed it, I'd have to wait hours for the next one!
Almost immediate, a group of a few hikers I had bumped into a couple of times during the last couple of days arrived. I hadn't really learned any of their names, but we recognized each other and they looked like drowned rats, completely soaked. It must have been an absolutely brutal day of hiking for them. I was certainly glad I missed it! They headed under the protective cover of the roof to get out of the rain, and positively lit up when I mentioned that I was actually waiting for a bus down to Borrowdale.
"There's a bus?!" they exclaimed, wanting to know more. They were utterly sick of the weather and had absolutely zero interest in keeping their steps connected, perfectly happy to miss a couple of miles of trail if it meant that they did not have to hike any further in the rain.
I told them the bus was scheduled to arrive in another 10 minutes or so, so their timing was impeccable.
Except, ten minutes later, no bus arrived. Then 11 minutes, 12 minutes.... The time ticked slowly by. I was worried the bus might blow by the stop if someone wasn't standing by the actual bus stop to flag it down, so I headed out into the rain and kept waiting, and waiting.... A half hour later, the bus still hadn't arrived. What happened to the stupid bus? I feared I might have to walk back to the hostel. I really, really did not want to walk all the way back. I could. I would even live! But the rain was coming down in buckets and I had already hiked this section--I definitely had no desire to do it again!
While waiting, a huge number of Dutch vehicles with crazy paraphernalia hanging off of them, decorated with flashing flights and honking horns constantly passed by. Dozens and dozens of them--perhaps even numbering over a hundred although I stopped counting them after the first dozen or so--usually in groups of three or four vehicles, many labeled with "garbage run 2024-England/Wales" written on them. What the heck was a garbage run? I had no idea. All of the vehicles had Dutch license plates, however, and many flew the Dutch flag on them.
Another vehicle labeled "highway maintenance" drove by in the direction where I expected our bus to come from. That, I thought, can't be good.
One of the other hikers got online and found the website for the bus system and discovered that this particular route was suffering from a so-called "service disruption" due to a washed-out road.
Well... crap. It did not provide any information about whether anymore buses would arrive or if they were canceled for the rest of the day. There was, however, another bus scheduled to arrive at the mine from Borrowdale. It was the wrong direction, but if the road was washed out ahead, the bus that arrived at the mine in the wrong direction would likely have to turn around and head back down the mountain in the direction we did want to go. Perhaps we should wait for that and see what happened?
So we had to wait another 15 minutes or so when, at last, the bus arrived. We talked to the bus driver, and she said that she was turning around there and that yes, she could take us back down the mountain. Hurray!
The group of us boarded the bus, paid our 2 pounds each, and started the ride down the mountain.
At one point, the bus drove through a small pond that had formed on the road that was over a foot deep. "That," I told the other hikers, "was not on the road when I took the bus up!"
The road was positively flooded, and the creeks were considerably higher than they were on the way up. This was a major storm! Rivers and waterfalls had formed everywhere! Seemed like there were hundreds of them pouring down the mountainsides! Crazy!
The bus eventually dropped us off, and then I had to walk through the torrential rain the 10-15 minutes back to the hostel where I changed into dry clothes and hung up my wet ones in the drying room. The adventure was over!
Back at the hostel, I spent most of the evening chatting with another hiker named Darrin doing the Coast to Coast in the opposite direction that I was.
Another hiker said that he had heard of the garbage run. He explained that, apparently, some people buy really crappy, cheap cars--less than a thousand euros or something--and drive them around for hundreds of miles. Many are bound to break down along the way, and they all try to help each other finish the course. I'm not so sure it's a "race" as much as it is a "course". Sounds like something to do, I suppose, reminding myself to look up more about the event but never getting around to it. (Even now, I've never looked it up online.)
But thus ended my day at the slate mine. Throughout the rest of the afternoon, I watched as more and more people arrived out of the downpour, looking soaked and miserable but glad to finally have arrived, and there were many stories shared of the difficulties experienced.
One couple had went on a hike but decided to turn back when they reached a creek that they felt was too dangerous to cross, but almost couldn't get back when earlier creeks they had cross had risen so high that recrossing them became somewhat dangerous as well. Others had detoured off the main trail and followed roads around a mountain rather than the trails heading up into them.
I managed to get pretty soaked through without even actually hiking at all and had issues with two buses due to the rain--I could only imagine how horrible a hike today would have been. It was a great day to zero! It would have bee a great day to not leave the hostel, in fact, but I was still happy that I had the chance to explore the slate mine. =)
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