If I had known then......

     Well we did this all ass-backward.
      Somehow a few years ago I got hold of the Stedman book, and on that basis we planned our trip, aided of course by the Internet, first resort of the lazy researcher.   Then, a few weeks ago a  kind,  knowledgeable, nay, even heroic walker-blogger, (http://coast2coastwalking.wordpress.com/) advised me to order the Harvey maps.   They came in the mail yesterday.  OMG.  This is the overview I needed when I was sort of blindly planning and making reservations.  It's all laid out in linear fashion, the ups and downs and boggy bits, with names!  It would have been so much easier if I'd had these maps before. 

      In similarly backwards process, after making all our reservations, one morning on a whim I checked kayak.com for airline tickets to Manchester, UK.   Kayak, if you're not familiar with it, is one of those sites that aggregates ticket info for every flight taking off three days before and after the date you input.  And it turned out that Tuesday, flying through Copenhagen (?!) was hundreds of dollars cheaper than Monday, or Wednesday, or any other day.  Why that would be is a mystey incomprehensible to mere mortals, but we went for it. So we fly on Tuesday, but it's not until Sunday that we had planned to be in St Bees.   In this case doing things backwards has a happy ending: three days in The Lake District to recover from jet lag before the walk starts.  
      One of us, and he will remain nameless, devoutly believes in the benefits of sleeping in, but even he will probably get up (at what to us will be 2:00 am) for a "free" and copious English breakfast.
   

I'm with him.

         My walking partner is a guy I know pretty well, in so far as one  can know another.  I'm purposefully uncertain how long ago we met; numbers like that give me the heebee-jeebies.  But it's undeniable that its been more than 25 years, the age of our oldest kid.  
     There were years when it seemed our lives were pretty separate, though we lived together. He traveled for work, I stayed home.  Household responsibilities were compartmentalized, his and mine.  Parallel lives under one roof.  Or maybe that's what teamwork looks like. 
     We travel well together.  He takes turns watching the bags and buying the tickets. He doesn't drive me crazy talking too much.  He's game; he doesn't mind backstreet hotels or squat toilets or street food for dinner.  He's good in a crisis and will get you to the ER at 2:00am on a snowy night.  He can laugh at himself. He loves the people I love.  
       I feel lucky to be traveling with this guy. 
   

Muddled

     Departure minus five days and counting.  Counting socks.  Four for you, four for me. It's a matter of family honor and tradition to travel light, one carry-on size bag per each, easy to haul on trains and up hotel stairs.  On this walk, our goal is to take the minimum amount of gear necessary to get by, without being fool hardy or putting oneself at risk.  The  principle is clear; the application is muddled. And the last minute state of mind seems to lower inhibition about buying stuff. 

     A kind and knowledgeable blogger advises gaiters and more maps.  I order the maps and I talk to the familiar faces at REI about gaiters.  They actually don't know much about gaiters at REI. but gaiters look very cool on cowboys and in old military photos.  And evidently they are just the thing for tramping through bogs on rainy days.  (More about that later perhaps.) 

      Packing is complicated by the fact that for us the walk is actually only part the first of a longer trip to continental destinations yet undecided. Perhaps we'll end up mailing home boots and gaiters, and reinvent ourselves in Europe.  Catch a ferry to Amsterdam or a cheap flights to Lisbon. Or maybe we'll go look for family names on tombstones in Scotland.  It's that spontaneity thing.  

      What about the Ipad ?  Can he come?  I would really miss him if he stayed behind.  But he'd need protection from rain and theft. And maybe we should break technological ties to the outside world?   Embrace ignorance.  

       And books. Last  time we went away for six weeks, I took ten books.  I know, I know, why not a Kindle or a Nook?  I was actually hoping that trip would be the justification for getting one.  But it turns out, the books I want to read are not available in electronic format, or if they are, they cost $9.99 vs. $2.00 at the Friends of the Library used bookstore. And once read, there's good karma in leaving a paperback behind for someone else.

      This is a muddled post, a muddled mind. 

Bad Mommy

     The question is, should the title of this post be "Bad Mommy" or "Mommy Grows Up"?

      We have more children than the national average.  All of them are young adults. (In some cases quite young and barely "adult".) None are married. All are in school or employed.  Although, in my experience these things can change and may in fact be in flux at this moment, unbeknownst to me.  In fact, a crisis may impend momentarily and the kids, the focus and locus of my heart and labors for the last two decades and more, would need mom to rush to their rescue to comfort and assuage their wounds. Um.... No.  Not likely.  They have their own lives now. (Though, they may want money.)

      And we have our own lives.  Don't we? Shouldn't we? 

      Repeating this mantra, we are helping our youngest move in at college and the day she starts her freshman classes, we are leaving the country.  Flying to Manchester, England. With fingers crossed. 

       Mommy grows up. 

Pounds and dollars and sense

     There are a lot of great, cheap places to visit in the world. Alas, the UK is definitely not one of them. Faced with the daunting fact that somehow we decided to go there anyway, we have made some changes that admittedly only incrementally improve matters.

• We got a pin-and-chip credit card, the norm in Europe. Word is, the usual US card works in the UK and Eurp ( except when it doesn't, like in automatic ticket machines) but hey, the new one is very cool. 
• We found a debit card ( from Capital One) that has no annual fee, no ATM fee and most importantly, no foreign transaction fee (for ATM withdrawals in foreign currency.) 
• For years we've had just one kind of credit card but we got a second that we'll carry separately, so that if the first is, uh, lost and has to be cancelled, we'll have another on hand as a fall back. 
• Many people advocate buying a cheap phone abroad with pay-as-you-go minutes when traveling. However, we have iPhones with AT&T and it seems just as economical to enable 30 minutes of calling within the UK on one phone ($30) and 50 texts on both phones ( $10 each) in case we are separated and need to communicate with each other. Both of these quotas could be upped online at any time, if necessary. As for email and internet access, in the past it has worked for us to use the iPhones when wifi is available and otherwise to keep them on airplane mode. 

     You try to find the smartest way to handle these things, but dealing with banks and phone companies, you kind of know you're going to get screwed in the end, eh?

I have some reservations about this

     The Coast2Coast Trail is an industry. Among other things, it has spawned those wonderful services that will move your stuff for you, daily, from one B&B to the next. However, to avail oneself of said service requires having things well planned ahead of time. It means having reservations.
     This is not my husband's style. He prefers travel that is more spontaneous. This is a guy who once bought an old van in Amsterdam and ended up in Afghanistan a year later. I, on the other hand, will happily sacrifice spontaneity, if it means not lugging a heavy backpack about.
     Yesterday we got a large envelope from the Royal Mail. Maybe it was delivered by a royal footman, I don't know, but it was in the mail box when I got home and inside were the luggage tags the baggage service will use when they pick up our bags each morning and drop them off at our next stop. I already love these people.
     It should be noted that this same service will also make all your reservations for you. Of course, there is a fee for that and speaking from personal experience, I'm sure they earn every penny. It's just that I did the research and the arithmetic and personally, I couldn't bear to pay the price for something I was pretty sure I could do myself.
     Partly because I have a real gift for making things more difficult than they need to be and a tendency to ponder the unknowables until I finally act on illogical impulse, making the reservations occupied me for more than a week and according to witnesses, made me a little crazy. At one point, I just decided to go with the most evocative names, the Dickensian ( Mrs Picklesby, the Bamblewick) or the verbal Viking remnants ( Ghyll Farm, Scarside Farm).
     Let me say, there are surmountable difficulties in doing this job yourself. It can be quite confusing to know exactly where a given pub is located and how far it is from the trail. There are places the all-seeing Google has not seen. It takes research and multiple emails.
     In some instances, it requires phone calls and it's worth noting, if you've never tried it, that you can call the UK for mere pennies through Google Voice, (the little phone icon I heretofore had never paid any attention to on the Gmail page. )
     What makes it do-able and even pleasant, are the very real, very nice people on the other end of the emails. Many of the innkeepers, quite legitimately, normally request a deposit to hold a reservation. (Or "secure a booking" if you prefer.) However, if they don't deal with credit cards, as many don't, it is difficult to comply from the US. Its astounding, really, in an age when communication is instantaneous, that moving money is so cumbersome. My personal check (in dollars) is not very useful, and bank transfer fees are prohibitive. Given the difficulties, many of these wonderful B&Bs waive the need for a deposit for their "overseas guests". It's amazing; I would totally understand if they just preferred not to deal with us at all, really.
     Thus we are left with two concerns: the somewhat problematic need to carry relatively large amounts of cash along with us to pay for lodging as we go. (For the record, there appear to be ATMs in Grassmere, Richmond and Kirkby Stephen.)   And secondly, that I didn't screw up the reservations, leaving us without a roof over our heads on a rainy night.

Do we need this?

Here's what I learned while shopping for The Walk:

1. Everything  is cheaper online. (But try it on in the stores first.) 

2. Cotton is evil.  Personally, I've preserved intact from the 70's the attitude that natural is good.  (Natural means cotton, linen and wool, full stop.) However my son, the in-house gear guru, has outlawed cotton and most especially those (iconic) denim jeans. The magic words are "quick-dry" and "wicking".

       My husband, who is adamant about wearing his same old stuff and not buying new stuff just for the walk, will serve as the control in a test of this quick drying hypothesis.

3. Don't restrict your shopping to the outdoor stores.  "Quick-drying" T-shirts are made in massive quantity for all those people who think this time they are really going to start jogging or going to the gym, and the stuff piles up for cheap at stores like TJ Maxx and Marshals, ( i.e. US stores that sell the stuff that didn't sell elsewhere.) 

4. Women are not created equal in the specialty outdoor gear stores. (You know who I mean.) Only a fraction of their floor space is devoted to stuff for women, and at least half of what hangs there is fashion, not truly meant for the great outdoors.  

     The nice salesman who brought me a stack of boxes full of hiking boots and trail running shoes to try on assured me that any of them would be fine for walking the dog in any weather.  True, I never mentioned that I intend to walk across England, but I never told him I have a dog either. I wonder if he assumes his male customers trying on hiking boots are dog walkers.

God help us

      Elsewhere on this blog I've posted a conflicted, self-conscious notion that walking the C2C is essentially a self-indulgent, first-world project that is embarrassingly silly compared to real challenges people face, especially in the third world or the third world among us. Well, a couple of friends-of-friends did that other walk, across another country (Spain) to Santiago de Campostelo.  And the thing is, that walk is not subject to the criticism I've self-imposed, because its a pilgrimage!  It's for God, ( or something) so we have to respect that and it's all okay. 

    So what's the difference?  Can the C2C be considered a "pilgrimage"?    Is God, or the gods, to be sought out there on the moors and mountain tops?  Do we care?

The benefit of breathing

      Walked the route we reckon to be nine miles again.  I'm beginning to wonder if the Coast to Coast walk as we've scheduled it will be too slow! Nine miles in the morning, a bit of a rest and another nine miles in the afternoon makes 18 sound easy. 

      Then I remember we're going to be on vacation. ( Or on holiday. Whatever.)  Time to sketch. Time to talk to sheep. Time to canoe on a lake with a poetic name. Time for our socks to dry.  Time to sit on ancient rocks and wonder who put them there.  Time to become something of an educated expert on comparative clotted creme. 

      Walking.  Putting one foot in front of  the other. Again and again.  I heard my yoga teacher in my head, saying, "Don't forget to breathe. Slow, deep breaths.  Watch the breath."

      High on oxygen.  

What to read and what to watch before you go

     So if you're going to walk the Coast to Coast, you could spend your free time before departure learning  to identify the guillemots and kittiwakes on the cliffs near St Bees, OR you could read up on the dismal history of lead mining in Swaledale.
     If that's what interests you, go for it but there's a lot to be learned from fiction as well. Good local fiction and film is not only entertaining but read or viewed ethnographically yields clues to local habits and thinking. You, (if you're not British) are not the target audience.  It's a private, national conversation, full of code words, and inside jokes and things "everyone" is presumed to know.  You are the eavesdropper; listen carefully.  

Books
     A must-read for  anyone who enjoys mysteries is Reginald Hill, a native of Cumbria, whose 24 (?) books featuring detectives Dalziel and Pascoe  are rich in local color and accents. 
     "Aye, what fettle?"
     "I've got my lads up the dale." 
     "It'll be thirsty work tramping around them fells. Is there owt I owt to know?"
                                                                                         ( a pastiche from On Beulah Heights. )  

     Then of course, there's the Brontes. 

      Books that I'm saving to take along but which my walking partner has already read and endorses:
Journey Through Britain by John Hillaby
      Mr Hillaby walked across England the other way, the long way, from southwest to northeast and wrote entertainingly about it. (Originally published in 1968, you can get it on Amazon used for one cent plus $3.99 shipping.   How do they do that?)
The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane 
       Another account of long distance walking that elicits superlatives in reviews. 
 The Natural Navigator: The Rediscovered Art of Letting Nature Be Your Guide by Tristan Gooley         
       This looks like hard-going, but finding one's way is much on our minds these day 

TV  
     There are a handful  TV programs set in areas along the C2C  available on YouTube. Check out these: 
Dalziel and Pascoe   
      The series was adapted for TV by BBC and full 90 minute episodes are available, although in my humble opion, the BBC Dalziel is not old enough, nor fat enough and hs accent has been watered down.  And Pascoe's wife, Ellie, is way too cute and perky. A little perky goes a long, long ways.   
Heartbeat   
      A young constable from London and his wife, a doctor, experience life in a Yorkshire village. Hour long dramas that wrap up neatly, of the heartwarming variety. Worth a look.
All Creatures Great and Small 
      It's actually not so much about the woolly and mooing creatures as it is the people and life in Yorkshire in the middle of the last century. Accents are so thick that subtitles would be useful. The sweep of the Yorkshire landscape and the slate houses have a starring role. Personally, watching folks pull on their wellies  to walk through the farmyard muck, I began to wonder about the farm B&B's where we're planning to sleep on our C2C walk. 
 Last of the Summer Wine  
      Apparently a comedy. A bunch of old codgers playing silly buggers 
Emmerdale 
    A soap opera set in a fictional village in the Yorkshire dales. Among the many story lines: a couple set to open a B&B. He wants to style it a boutique hotel because he doesn't want to deal with grubby walkers who don't respect the furniture.  She says it's the walkers who'll pay the bills. But then she gets killed somehow by someone because someone was cheating on her sister...or maybe that was someone else.  

Film
     Withnail and I is referred to as a "cult film" from the 80's.  The definition of "cult film" seems to be that a small circle of people loved it and most people thought it was awful.    We got Withnail from Netflix and we watched it, with a sort of horror, right through to the end only because it was filmed around Bampton and Shap and lives on there in local legend.  The Crown and Mitre in Bampton, where entirely by coincidence, we will be staying, claims proud proximity to a phone box shown in the movie.  It's a sort of shrine to Withnail, I gather.  
There are a few clever lines in the film, but none of the characters are at all likable: not the young, aspiring actors who go "on holiday by accident" in a decrepit farm house nearby,  not the pathetic, aging, gay uncle who joins them and not the stoned-out drug pusher who crashes their apartment in their absence. 
     Full disclosure: family members who ought to know have declared I have no sense of humor.  But really, what is pleasant about watching people swill enough liquor to fill a bathtub,  behave offensively and drive drunk? 
    You do get to watch the rain come down in unending torrents, which is realistic perhaps, but not an encouraging spectacle for prospective walkers. 

     By the way, kittiwakes look like seagulls to me and guillemots are black with a white spot on the wing and amazing red feet.