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.