Now that you mention it,

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. 

Ta-Daaah!

       We did it! We walked across England!  

       We traipsed into Robin Hoods Bay mid-afternoon, signed the Coast to Coast log of finishers that is kept in the pub on the waterfront and checked it for the names of friends who finished earlier. The tide was waaaaay out, so I dropped my rock from the Irish Sea, that travelled all the way across England nestled in my backpack, into a deep tidal pool, kerplunk!  And we had a celebratory dinner with walking friends, including two indomitable ladies who were celebrating a 70th birthday and a warm hearted guy from The Other Washington, the one in the top left corner of the map. We closed the restaurant down, but the staff was very understanding about it. 

        












The last day was 15+ miles over more moorland, more lovely woodland, and just to make the thing symmetrical, ends as it began, with a walk along the cliffs over the sea. 

       

         Robin Hoods Bay is a cute little town but walkers don't own it. We finished on Saturday and the town is lively with tourists and day trippers and families eating take-away fish and chips on the beach. Walkers are a like secret society passing amongst the holidayers. 

       Our B&B is ten steps from the water front with narrow, winding hallways and claustrophia inducing, low ceilings.  The story is that the warren of cottages and old buildings at the waterfront were once linked by secret tunnels and hidden attic passageways to facilitate a thriving trade in smuggled goods. Over the last few centuries  the cliffs have crumbled, dropping  200 of these houses into the sea but now the town resides behind massive concrete sea walls buttressing the cliffs 

        We were very lucky in our walk. We finished with no physical complaints, but stories to tell. The stories are probably of interest only to other walkers, but we relish them. And we have fond memories of friendly, fascinating people, those who live along the trail and those others who like us, were only passing through. 

Penultimate Day

      We started yesterday up in the moors and descended into the picture-perfect Esk River valley.  

       The most vicarious excitement was provided by a new walking friend, Mathew, an expat Brit, who went to the pub for dinner with us last night.  Didn't I mention something about adders, the only venomous snake in the UK, last time I wrote?  It seems Mathew took a short cut through the heather yesterday morning and an adder bit his boot! He said he'd never seen an adder in 30 years and didn't really see this one either.... until it bit his boot.  Good thing he had on leather boots and wasn't shod like another trail legend, the Aussie-who-hikes-in-crocs.  (I know. It strains credulity, but people swear they've seen him. 

Share the trail

In addition to adders, one must beware of hens and ducks!        

      A B&B guy a few nights ago told me about another trail legend, an American woman hiking and carrying all her own gear. She reached the end of the trail at the North Sea ...and turned around and hiked all the way back to the start! He said he knew it really happened, because she stayed at his place going both ways.

Dream house 

Beggars Bridge at Glaisdale

      Today was a relaxed day with a relatively short walk, due to the incompetence of the lady who booked our accommodations (me), the realitive paucity of the same in the vicinity and the fact that the process did not begin until the last week in July.  (Some people make arrangements six months to a year ahead. Imagine being that organized!)  

      The town we find ourselves in tonight is Grosmont, which is pronounced "Grow-mont" in a token gesture to its supposed (by me) Norman antecedents. Aside from the fact that we didn't walk very far, it's a great place to stay; the B&B is in an art gallery! 

      There's an old railroad station here and by chance today was a big day: a celebration of old steam trains. The center of town was swarming with avid choochoo train fans,  mostly men with cameras and their indulgent wives.  They must have all had train sets when they were boys.  The locomotives really were quite impressive though, blasting enormous clouds of steam and smoke and  blowing their whistles as they chugged in and out of the station.

      Tomorrow we climb back up to the moors and head for the sea, our final day on the Coast to Coast.  It all seems pretty easy in retrospect, (although this may be a magical memory trick.) I'll be sad to reach the sea and the end of our little adventure.  But there's not much chance we'll turn around and do it all over again in reverse. 

       

Cheese, fog and blanket bog (Chop Tank to Blakey Ridge)

     The sign, aimed at decreasing the environmental pact on the moorland, warned anyone tempted to stray from the footpath about the perils: adders ("if bitten, seek urgent medical attention") sheep ticks ("Lyme disease may be fatal") and blanket bog. I'm not sure what it is but blanket bog, sounds really scary.  

     I didn't take many pictures today. I figured I could just take yesterday's and add a fog filter in Photoshop. There are advantages to hiking in clouds and fog. For one thing, it affords more privacy to those who pee in the heather. And being unable to see far down ( or up) the trail, one walks in the moment. Very zen. 

A not terribly helpful sign 

     We got a late start this morning after a two hour breakfast. Fortuitously, when offered an alternative to a Full English breakfast described as "cheese", I went for it. 

Cheese it was and it came with a full explanation of the background, breeding and potential of each cheese on the tray. 

Starting with the dark smudge at 12:00, you have a local Theakston cheddar made with beer. Moving clockwise, Coverdale ( a creamy Windsleydale cheese,) then a smoked Winsleydale and a pure Windsleydale ( good with apples.)  Continuing clockwise, next is Cotherstone cheese from County Durham (similar to cream cheese.) Then three cheeses from Lancashire, the first made with cinnamon and nutmeg, the next being a goats' milk cheese and then a waxed sheeps' milk cheese from Inglewhite Dairy. Are you fascinated? The last is a hard "Poacher's Cheese", which leaves only " the foreigner" in the middle: a vintage, imported Gouda.  450 varieties of cheese are made in England, more than in France, I was told. 

     After this presentation, I was afraid if I confessed to preferring the Gouda, she'd throw me out the door. 

      The talk then progressed to the 600 year old grudge against Lancashire,  which persons in the dale are descended from Captain James Cook and the neighbor's bull who terrorized everyone so that it had to be put down and the farmer wept. Among other diverse topics.  

       Did I say we got a late start? Well, what's the rush? 

      The old (circa 1553) Lion Inn stands alone on moors, a welcoming presence on the horizon visible for miles. So they say. We pretty much saw it for the first time, suddenly looming out of the fog, when we walked in the front door. 

More Moors (Osmotherly to Chop Gate)

  

      Coming  home last night through the dark alley, I flipped a light switch and foof! Blew the circuit, plunging the whole B&B into darkness.  But Jim and the man from the pub soon put things right. Second foible was this morning: the dog was scratching at the dining room door.  "Oh, let him in," we said. "We like dogs."  Are you sure?  "Oh, yes, yes." So the landlady opened the door and the dog and her two giant pups rushed in. One dropped his ball right in my plate.  "Oh, he likes you!" she gushed. I should have just set the plate on the floor and let him finish it off the bacon, lick up the runny eggs. 

       The B&B is closing next week for the season and perhaps forever as the landlady can't buy her wicked ex out.  Pity, because its a lovely house in a picturesque village.  After breakfast, she sent us off, saying to give her love to tonight's landlady, an old friend. 

     And we walked off down the road and up into the moorland.  And up and down and way up and more down. It was misty.  We could see enough to know that the views must be absolutely magnificent; the book even promised us a first glimpse of the North Sea from the heights. But today it was more of a Chinese painting, just wispy hints. 

Bench to sit on and admire the view.
Maybe some other day.

    There seems to be a large community of pheasants, or maybe it's grouse, who nest in the heather. When startled, they take off with a great flapping of wings, flying barely three feet above the heather and talking to each other in scratchy voices.  When we finally made it down to the road, the B&B guy kindly picked us up where the trail crosses the road and drove us to the farm down a road littered with smashed pheasant carcasses.  Or maybe it's  grouse? 
     Tomorrow promises to be more of the same inexorable climbing,  ridge after ridge. Only it's supposed to rain. 

    
   

On the way to Osmotherley

        Today's walk was an agricultural tour.  We walked by fields and saw humongous machines  plowing, flinging manure around and seeding. And all the while, on the horizon, the Cleveland Hills and Yorkshire moors, the last barrier to cross before we reach the sea, loomed closer and larger. 

  




     At this point the C2C requires you do a really stupid thing, something I'm sure your mother would not approve of. It runs smack into the A19, which is not really a freeway, it's a "dual carriage way". Walkers have to wait for a break in the lorries roaring by and dart across. Look right! It's amazing how neurologically hard wired the head swivel to the left to check for on-coming traffic is. Write it on the back of your hand or the top of your boots: Look right!

     

This is actually the second Really Stupid Thing we've down. The first was the descent from Mt Helvelyn, which is a vertigo inducing hands and bum descent down a rock face. In the US, you'd have to sign a liability waiver first.  In the US, it would be fenced off: " Danger! No Admittance!"   In the US, they would have built a gondola to carry you down.  

  But we lived through both. I suggested we eat our lunch/snack in the medium of the A19 but we crossed in two sprints and pushed on. We ended up taking off our boots and wiggling our toes while eating Snickers bar on a bench in the next town. ("Donated by the Parish Council on the Occasion of the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2003.")

Osmotherly, North Yorkshire. 

Bed and Breakfast

    I think I honestly prefer the relative anonymity of staying at the pub. For whatever reason, I booked mostly B&Bs, which sometimes means the spare bedroom in a farmhouse.  Its cultural exchange of a sort but only the gregarious feel really comfortable in close quarters like that. 

    When you arrive at the B&B, the custom is to offer you tea.  Lets admit it, tea is basically colored water. I can take it or leave it.  It is usually accompanied by cake or biscuits studded with raisins. The most notable fact about raisins, as far as I am concerned, is that they are not chocolate, so what is the point of them, really?

     What I had really been craving was a glass of cold, 2% milk.  None of the small towns we walked through even had a shop to buy a pint of milk.  So when the landlady set the tea tray next to us and went back to fetch the sugar, I eyed the little pitcher of milk hungrily. I checked quickly for the ubiquitous CCTV cameras and convinced that was no one was watching, grabbed the pitcher off the tea tray and downed all but a few drops.  Very satisfying. 

     The B&B people always sit down with you while you drink your tea and make nice. Eventually they get down to the real point: what do you want for breakfast?  It's mostly a process of elimination: no  beans, no black pudding, no mushrooms, no sausages, no, no, no, thank you. 

      The B&B lady admitted that the great advantage of running a B&B on the C2C is that people only stay one night. If you don't like them, if doesn't really matter; they'll be moving on the next morning. 

      They saw us off at the door like old friends. Actually, the walking season is winding down.They are closing in two days and heading off on holiday, taking a coach ( read: bus) through the Chunnel to a little bit of Britain on the Spanish Costa Brava. 

      

Imagine that!

    On our day off in Richmond as tourists, we went to the small town museum.  They can boast of having the set on which James Heriott's All Creatures Great and Small was filmed and a Chemist's shop (pharmacy) from the early 1900's.  Most of the museum is obviously aimed at school children and a poster on the wall explains "Before 1948, if you got sick and went to the doctor, you had to pay."   Imagine that, boys and girls!

Danby Don't be so far

     We walked out of Richmond, headed for Danby Wiske, on a sunny Sunday morning. We had Fourteen miles of mostly level walking through farmland before us.

      I struck an optimistic note by wearing sunglasses.  I'm convinced that probably only a small minority of people in Northern England even own sunglasses.  What would would be the point?

  England has a plethora of footpaths, the wonderful heritage of towns built before cars became the dominate mode of transport.  But some are just the safest way home from the pub after a few pints, some are the way to school and some go to the next village.  Huge thanks to the people who went around tacking these signs to fence posts and gates so we can easily find our way across the country:

     The farmers put in styles and gates accessing the footpaths that traverse their fields but they don't necessarily like it.  Yesterday we opened the gate to find the farmer had elected to put the cattle feed right at the point the path came through.  We had to make a our way through the beasts gathered there and through the mucked up, pooped up ground.  Kind of funny. 

Not a real wide gate

Crossing a style in style 

      

                   

      Speaking of cows, did you know they hate dogs?  One of our British walking friends is walking the C2C with her dog, a collie. It's a real problem for her, getting through a field of cows. She says they turn murderous at the sight of a dog. 

      Spotted a road sign for a deer  today.   I think it was just wishful thinking.  We've walked two thirds of the way across rural England and haven't seen any deer, or squirrels either. ( Of course, we have more than enough  of those in our own back yard. ) Honestly, there don't even seem to be many birds.  I have seen (dead) badgers and (dead) rabbits.  What has become of all the wild animals here?  There's plenty of woodland. And don't they have "gamekeepers" or something? Where are they keeping the wild life? 

       It was an uneventful day, kind of restful, really. Most exciting picture I have to leave you with is tombstones in the churchyard where we sat on a bench and ate chunks of cheese on oat cakes, and almonds.  If you've never had oat cakes, good sharp cheddar makes them almost palatable. Almost. 

      

The Cimate Can Kill You.

This is a memorial seen on the wall at St Agatha's  Church in Easby near Richmond, UK. 

The Landlady's Story

On the door was a typed note telling arriving guests to wash their boots (bucket and brush provided) and leave them and all wet clothing on the covered porch.  Fair enough.  On the stairs was a note reminding guests carrying luggage up not to scuff the wood floors.  The room was Victoriana, right down to the claw-footed tub and the tea tray and table were set beautifully.  The landlady had a sweet, melodious voice and wore a dress with an apron over it.  She was that kind of lady. 

     So I was totally astonished when she came out to see us off and said that when the walking season ends and the B&B closes at the end of the month, she and her husband are heading off for eight weeks in Peru to hike the lesser known alternative to the Inca Trail.  Alright, maybe my assumptions about her were dead wrong, but I'm still trying to imagine that. 

     She told a good story though, over breakfast. Seems she had recently bought a new black car and she was so proud of it.  She polished it up to a high shine.  And on a Sunday she and her husband decided to to go for a bit of a walk themselves. They drove up the fell as far as one can and parked the car.  When they returned some hours later, she was horrified to find that someone had bashed in the side of her new car and not even left a note taking responsibility! She was terribly upset but took the car into the mechanic.  

      "Well," he says, examining the damage, " It doesn't happen often but I see it occasionally." And he pointed out to her the six sets of horn imprints bashed into the car by a ram, enraged and battering his own image in the shine of the car's finish.  And she started laughing at that point, she said, because you can't be angry with a dumb animal, can you? 

    

Antithixotropism

     Antithixotropism is the new word for the day.  Maybe you're familiar with this multisyllabic mouthful but it's not something I learned about in Social Science  or foreign language classes. (Although it is clearly Greek in parts.)
     The subject came up when we were walking with a friendly English couple. He was a physicist who used to measure bomb craters in Northern Ireland for a living. In those years, he said, he avoided having his picture taken. He also mentioned trips to consult at (cue ominous music) Quantico, Virginia.
      Anyway, with the oozy bogs on my mind, I asked a question referring to a mutual friend, a big, robust guy who probably weighs twice what I do.  On the other hand, this same friend had mentioned the difficulty of finding hiking boots to fit his size 15 feet.  So, I asked, given his body weight, would he sink deeper, (twice as deep?) as I into the muck or would those big boot soles act like broad platforms and hold him up?
     " Antithixotropism!"  the guy with the shadowy past immediately exclaimed. 
      "Whut?" said I, "Spell that!"
      Thixotropism without the "anti"', he explained, is the property of certain viscous materials to become more liquid when stirred or shaken, such as perhaps honey or jelly, and certainly the clay hillsides that collapse onto villages after earthquakes.  With the "anti", he theorized, the opposite property is in play and a heavy, ponderous footfall actually firms up the jelly-like muck.  
      I don't know whether any empirical study has tested this hypothesis of bog-walking, but the North Yorkshire moors are said to have boggy bits, so we can look forward to the opportunity of doing so. 

Happy Sheep

Do these sheep look worried?                                                                  

Road to Richmond

     We set out this morning walking to  Richmond and shortly overtook Fred on the trail. Fred is in his 80's and a great story teller we met a few nights ago.  When he collects a suitable number of listeners in a pub, he pulls out a book he wrote, and reads to the assembled.
     As it happened, the path we were on was once used to carry coffins up the hill for burial and there are great level stones along the way that are said to be there for the bearers to rest the coffin on while they caught their breath.  I couldn't help remembering Fred telling us in a pub that if he died on the trail, to just roll him out of the way so no one would trip and remember that he had died doing what he wanted to do.  Indications are, however, that Fred has years to walk yet; a great pair of legs on the man and besides, he doesn't hold with a lot of hand washing. It lowers your immunity, says Fred.
      One is constantly opening and closing gates because the public footpath runs through private farmland. The challenge of the various gate latches reminds me of the interlocking metal puzzles we got for Christmas as as kids.  A sign posted requests that walkers go single file to decrease damage to the meadow.  Fred tells us that he once watched a woman cautiously walk a wide circle around a huge bull sitting in the middle of the path only to be berated by the farmer shouting , "Stick to the bloody footpath, woman!"

      A problem with morning walks, especially after swallowing a big pot of coffee at breakfast, is finding a little privacy, especially on the moors.  It's pretty hard to conceal oneself behind heather that only grows a foot high. One can only hope to come across a useful boulder, propitiously left behind by  some ancient glacier.   

(Note boulder)

     One of the great advantages of being a guy, as far as I can tell, is that they don't face the same logistical problems in this matter.  With rain gear, by the way, the logistics can involve three or four layers to get up and down.  Down and up, rather.
     I complained about the lack of direction signs for the trail in the Lake District.  In the Yorkshire Dales the trail seems to be much more clearly marked.  However, since we're on the subject of elimination, here's a special direction sign, left by a considerate cow, for people who walk along looking at their feet.

       

     There is no doubt a great deal I could learn by listening to Fred. However not being by nature a very congenial person, after a bit I decided I'd rather listen to the sound of my own footsteps and the bleeting of the sheep. I moved off and the castle town of Richmond, where we plan to spend a day as tourists, soon arose on the horizon.

     

The Swell Swaledale Day or Walking and Talking

 

        Today we decided against the higher trail that climbs up to the moors and the ruins of the mining industry. The mines closed at the end of the 1800's, leaving the region poverty stricken and depopulated.  Instead we took the lower trails and spent the day ambling along the green banks of the meandering River Swale, the water stained a rusty color (by iron? peat?)  and it was lovely. It was in fact exactly the sort of vision I entertained when we first got the notion to walk across England.

     Most of the day we were alone with thue sheep and the river, but we saw a few walking friends, members of the nomadic tribe to which we temporarily belong.  These people are of two sorts. The first are  those who are walking the same itinerary and speed as we are and thus meet up again and again on the trail or in the pubs and B&Bs.  They are all acquainted with each other, and trade news such as  "Have you seen Brian and Kate today?"  "Did you hear what happened to the three Canadian women?"
       The three Canadian women, said to have originally been six, are of various ages and races and for some reason are widely assumed to be nuns. Reportedly they told someone that their luggage arrived late, and so they never really got a grip on this walk.  Allegedly they told someone else that they had a compass, but couldn't use it and so they chucked it.  One man said he physically picked up the oldest (very old) and littlest of the women and lifted her over a stile she couldn't climb. Another man said he found them wandering lost in the bogs, where they had no business being (there being an alternative, lower trail that avoids the bog) and he spent three hours up there, trying to get them all safely down.
      The second sort are the people who are walking farther and faster than we are and so they may be seen only once, and move on.  But some of them make a lasting impression.
      There was a little old man who claimed to have visited 120 countries and told us about being arrested in Khartoum.
      And there was a voluble little woman, dressed all in black who overtook us the first day on the cliffs above the Irish Sea.  She had a hefty backpack and a lively, little, black and white dog that she picked up whenever there were horses or cows around. She said she'd walked the C2C many times. Was she perhaps a teacher, we asked, since seemed to have a lot of time for walking?  
      Ah no, you see, she used to be a nurse but that's all finished now. There was a patient, see, an old dear with Alzheimer's like, she was always falling, and well, she died. And another nurse accused her of having caused it, by sedating her, see, but she never! Of course she didn't but it went to trial and now it's in a higher court and she could go to jail. It could happen. But she's not bitter, no, no. It's not going to ruin her life, no, it's going to make her life, yes, it is! She's been doing washing up like, but she's learned you don't need electricity , no, you don't! She collects trash like and burns that and if it smells bad, poison-like, well, you just open the window!
      What to make of this story? This was pathos but she was resolutely upbeat.  Or maybe its not a good idea to be walking along the cliffs, a sheer drop to the ocean, with a possibly mad woman? And on and on she talked until our pace proved too slow for her and she hurried  on ahead.  We never saw her again, of course, but I wonder what became of her. 

Bog Blog (Kirkby Stephen to Keld)

     The day started, as they all seem to, with a lovely breakfast and a steep ascent.

     The first landmark on the days's walk, the Nine Standards, is way up on a ridge where the wind howls, but at least it wasn't raining.  Someone, at some unrecorded point in time, built nine tall and expertly crafted cairns up there, visible on (rare) clear days from miles away.  The mystery is why they're called "Standards". There's no standardization at all; they're all different sizes and shapes. 

It's an area with a long history of anarchy and warfare (those barbarous Scots, you know) and a man at the top said the cairns once marked a tribal border. However, since  there's no authoritative explanation, I'm free to make up my own story: they are memorials to nine brothers, all killed in battle, whose names are long forgotten. But there stand the rocks. 

     From the ridge, one then heads into the dreaded peat bog.  The community of walkers to which we temporarily belong, meets up in pubs and B&Bs and tells stories about the bog, about the woman who sank in up to her knees, and another who was sucked into the muck up to her waist! Our landlady laughed at this talk, assuring us boots and gaitors would suffice, no wet suits needed. 

       Peat is mysterious stuff. How do you dry out the wet muck so that you can burn it? Who dreamed that up? Is it like pre-coal? Is coal well-aged  peat? 

       The  bog calls to mind the Everglades, which is often called the "Sea of Grass". It's tricky walking, trying to find the driest way around and guessing each time you put a foot down how firm the ground will be. 

     The trail is marked here and there with posts. As long as the fog doesn't come down and  you can see the posts, (some of which are well sunken into the bog themselves) there's a way out.

       At  one point there's even a bridge (of limited utility.) 

      Leaping over muck and stepping on reeds and heather, we got through the bog with our toes dry inside our boots. 

      That wasn't so bad, I said to some British walkers gathered 'round a table. "Oh," they said, "It's the bogs near Darby, on the Pennine Trail that are really bad. Took two men to pull poor Thomas out! If we 'adn't a been there, he might not a made it.  Panickin' he was."

      We tromped on into Keld, the halfway point of the trail, for the night.  We've walked (well over) 100 miles. That's thousands of sheep, millions of rocks, every shade of green perceptible to the human eye, a half pint every night and no blisters! (knock on wood.)  My boots are my friends. They've got Cumbrian sheep shit and peat bog muck in the seams now, but I love'em.

       We've traversed the Lake District, so herewith are today's "Welcome to Yorkshire" photos:

        

Cheers! 

Some moor walking

    Fourteen miles over the moors and pastures to Kirkby Stephen today. Moors.... you know, Heathcliff and the Hound of the Baskervilles?   Didn't see either, unless the hound disguised himself as a sheep.

    The moors don't seem to merit their sinister reputation but we had the best possible  company for walking through geography with desolate literary associations: two sunny Australians!  A kind-hearted teacher and a red-haired,  6'5" policeman who walked in shorts.  He explained that you lose very little heat through your knees.  (For the record, there was a steady drizzle but the high was in the upper 40's, which is good weather for walking, not at all cold if you dress for it and keep moving.)

I thought at first the Aussies had legal problems because they kept talking about the "trial". It turned out they meant the one we were walking on, which was fairly muddy after three days off rain. 

         But it's the rain that keeps England so gloriously green, isn't it. That, and the intensive application of sheep shit.

Failure to stride

    We were the only guests at the farmhouse and went to sleep listening to the sheep bleating, calling goodnight to each other, a peaceful, restful sound. But when I awoke later in a very dark room, the sheep had fallen silent or moved on and rain battered the window. 

       The walk we were set to do that morning was over a high mountain pass called Kidsty Pike. Walkers tell stories about Kidsty Pike. 

     Breakfast was lovely and we drank tea and watched the wind blowing with gale force winds. The house was snug and solid though. If you want a house to withstand storms, you could do worse than to build it with two foot thick slate walls. 

     

       

     Our landlady raised the subject. "Are  you going up there? I wouldn't if I were you. No, no, I wouldn't. The winds'll be higher up there and you'd be blown right off. I'd have to send the mountain rescue. Yes, yes, I would. "   

     It'd be foolish to ignore the advice of someone who'd lived right there all her life and hosted walkers for years. We move the tea pot and spread the maps out on table, trying to plot a low elevation detour that would get us to Bampton. Eleven miles plodding along the lake and how many more on the road.....

       We suit up in rain gear, say goodbye, and start off.  The storm is exhilarating but the driving rain seems to come from all sides and the trees are taking a beating. 

         Passing the youth hostel, I glance at the bus schedule. A bus to Penrith, the only city in the vicinity, is passing in eight minutes. It's Sunday, so there won't be another for hours. 

       We round the corner into the village and it's easy to spot the bus stop: a dozen walkers in rain gear, already sodden, cluster around the bus door.  The moment of truth and one minute to decide..... we climb on. Plan B. 

        There is, of course, no bus from Penrith on to Bampton on Sunday and shops are all closed. We spend an hour in the town museum. We window shop in the rain. We drink coffee in the cafe at Sainsburys, a supermarket. I'm depressed and frustrated. 

       I browse magazines and he chats up the ladies at the help desk. They call a friend who runs a taxi business and within seconds he whisks us off to Bampton.  He runs his taxi service from behind the steering wheel, taking calls and calling on three cell phones while speeding around the curves of a narrow lane with stone walls on both sides. Sheesh. 

      At the pub in Bampton the sheepish walkers trail in. They have different stories to tell but nobody, it turns out, nobody walked over Kidsty Pike today. 

        

      

Island of crazy people

     In Grasmere we could see the lake from our bedroom window. And the proprietor, before he fixed fried eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms and beans for his guests' breakfast each morning, got up extra early and went for a swim in the lake. No wet suit.  He told me the trick is to exhale as you plunge in. That might be true; I don't intend to find out.

     This is called "wild swimming" and there were other wild swimmers at the B&B, all excited about the mountain lakes they were planning to swim in.  

       It was an arduous day for us too. The trail out of Grasmere goes straight up. And up. The weather was perfect and out of an excess of enthusiasm for the views, ( or perhaps the huffing and puffing impaired our cognitive function) we impulsively chose the high road over Mt Helvellyn, third highest peak in England. Spectacular. 

     However, en route, we had to step off the trail and wait for the crowd to pass. They were running up the damn mountain.  It was 50 km race. 

At this point I realized this is an island of mad men. Walking the C2C trail is one of the saner endeavors people do. 

      The long walk down Hellvelyn and into the village of Patterdale was exhausting.  We stopped at the pub to eat before finding the farm B&B. I love pubs!  It's like a party. People we've met along the trail share stories and strangers chat. You order at the bar and if we share an entree and eat out of the same dish,  no one cares.  You do have to be careful not to step on a sleeping dog though. 

    

Eavesdropping

      "Having your tea" evidently means having dinner.  OK, whatever.  Still there's some momentary cognitive dissonance on hearing a mother in the pub admonish her preschool age son, "Colin, sit down and eat your tea!"

The path to Patterdale.

    Unless you've been there or have a map in front of you, I don't expect you to know where Patterdale is. I certainly didn't. The directions were like this:  Climb that mountain. You'll see a tarn ( a lake) at the top. Keep going east.   Climb another mountain.  Then walk down the mountain and that's Patterdale. Uh-huh. A sign post, here and there, would be nice.

             There are NO signs.  A lot of the C2C trail is on National Park land and its thought by some that sign posts would mar the wilderness. They would detract from the ethos of wilderness. Hmmm     

              One innkeeper explained that there are a lot of footpaths in England. (Point conceded; there are indeed.)  And,  he said, paths are  just paths. You could go any number of places from a given path, so how can you put up a sign saying where the path goes? 

        And he said, you should know where you're going. Otherwise, why set out in the first place?  

         This all seemed like an interesting chain of thought, but it wasn't going to make it any easier to get to Patterdale. 

Miles and miles, farms and farms

     Today was a vacation from a vacation, a needed respite from walking, and we spent it in Grasmere.  The town is something of a shrine to Wordsworth, ( the poet, you know) who lived here. Instead of paying homage to him, we visited the ATM, (the only one we'll see for a week)  and restocked our emergency survival supplies, (the best of which come in neat little bars from a company called Cadburys.) We had tea, and let me tell you, a good scone just makes you realize how bad most scones are.  And we are enjoying wifi, ( Hi, y'all!) something poor ol' Wordsworth never knew he didn't have. 

  

Farms

    We haven't had wifi either the last few days because we've been staying on farms in the middle of nowhere. Somehow, I'm surprised to learn that there is a middle of nowhere in England, but there is and it's right around here. And a lovely place it is too. 
       Another thing I've learned is that there are two kinds of farms.  The first one was down a long road through horse pastures.  The horses were huge with really big feet. They were friendly, though and came right out in the road to say hi.  We slept in the attic room of a very, old building and dried our boots by a coal fire.   Duck in the doorways so you don't whack your frontal lobe on the beam. It was comfortable, but out the back door there was farm equipment and gas tanks and bales of hay and mucky things. It was a farm. 

       The second farm was also very old and it was lovely.  Flowers were blooming in a wheel barrel by the door.  The landlady explained to me that they don't actually own the farm.  They rent it from The National Trust, a nonprofit whose mission includes the preservation of rural life, sustainable agriculture and native breeds of farm animals. Her husband maintains a flock of heritage Hardwick sheep, but the wool is not worth much these days. Thus they actually make their living from the B&B, and some cottages they rent to people who want to stay on a "farm".    

     What to make of this? The goals of the Trust are laudable, and her husband is out there on the fells tramping around in the rain with the sheep, but it all seems kind of make believe. It's a bit of a puzzle. 

 

Miles
      Tomorrow we are only walking  twelve miles.  Bear in mind however that  those are British miles.  When Americans travel,  we do exhausting mental arithmetic, converting Celsius to Fahrenheit  so we know what to wear, and currency calculations to know what we can afford, so it's comforting that the UK, like the US, is an obtuse, backward country that uses miles, not kilometers like the rest of the world.  Hah! So you think.
         At home we walk three miles an hour easy. But a British mile, full of rocks and bogs, can easily take a whole hour. Clearly, American miles and British miles are not equivalent.  The exact conversion formula has not been established, but believe me, those twelve British miles are going to take a hell of a lot longer than regular old US miles would.  They'll probably take all day.