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.
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