Well the weekend in Kendal has been and gone. Despite the horrific flooding happening in the Cumbria region the festival continued as Kendal had not been terribly affected. They had a bit of flooding on the Thursday but no where near the devastation that was happening further into the Lake District.
We had originally planned to stay at the same B&B in Ambleside as last year but it was booked out. Thankfully this didn’t go ahead as we wouldn’t have been able to get into the area anyway as they were blocked off by flooding.
Friday morning we headed up to the Lake District after having checked the forecast and road closures. All were looking well. We arrived in the area about 1pm and headed straight into Kendal Mountain Festival Basecamp to see what tickets we could pick up. We chose a Ski and Board movie session Friday night, Climbing movie session on Saturday morning, Andy Kirkpatrick’s talk in the afternoon, followed by Alain Robert’s talk Saturday evening, Free Flight movie session then a final Mountaineering movie session on Sunday morning before heading home in the afternoon. Phew, a jam packed weekend.
Our main reason for going this year was Alain Robert, one of Steve’s climbing heroes. You may know Alain better as “Spiderman” or the “Human Spider”. His more well known expertise is “builderring” or climbing buildings instead of rocks/mountains. He’s most recent conquest was the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.
Imagine our surprise when on Friday night before we headed off to our first movie session, there he was, Monsieur Robert himself. Steve had recently finished reading Alain’s book “With Bare Hands” and had it on him in case an opportune moment such as this presented itself. Not wanting to interrupt other peoples opportunities to speak to their own hero, Steve waited for his chance to say hello. His patience and respectful nature was not lost on Alain who seemed to have noticed Steve waiting. When Alain had finished speaking to some others Steve approached him for an autograph and was treated to not only an autograph but a long conversation with this incredible man. They sat down and chatted away happily for over an hour and a beer later. It was a privilege to chat to Alain but most importantly it was really insightful to see that this is a guy that clearly has a passion for what he does and is not quite sure why he is so popular. He sees himself as just a normal guy doing what he enjoys.
I think Steve could quite happily have turned around and gone home at that point having meet Alain but I was really keen to get intake of movies. The ones that stood out for me most this year were “20 seconds of joy” and “The Asgard Project”. Actually I would also add “Welsh Connections” and “Slab Monkeys”. It was a shame that Karina Hollekim couldn’t make it to talk after “20 seconds of joy” which went through her journey to becoming a base jumper.
It was a fab weekend. Not many photos though as the weather was shocking!