Getting to Seatoller

    We walked off so innocently that morning on an easy path around Ennerdale Water, along the lake, a long, long way around a quiet lake.  We didn't see a soul. And then gently, so as you'd hardly notice, it began to rain. Rain is not a big problem if you've got the gear to deal with it and can get it on before you're soaked, but there's not much you can do about fog.
      After the Black Sail Youth Hostel (which was closed) a notation on the map advises the hiker "not to take the obvious path."  Why the hell not? Just to make it all more fun? We search for a less obvious path. Is that a path? Or is it just the way the sheep frequently trod? It might be a path, but in the rain, it is rapidly turning into a drainage ditch.  
        We climb a drumlin and scan the grass and heather for a path.   Drumlins, by the way, are peculiar  little bumps in the topography. Too small to be called "hills", these are closely spaced along the riverside. Elves probably live there. These particular drumlins are also populated by large, black cows.  We check anxiously, but none of them seem to have penises. Still, they are very large and seem potentially menacing. What do we know about cows? And we're in their drumlins.  
         Finally, far off, on the other side of the river, we sight the only humans we've seen all day. They are tiny spots of brightly colored goretex moving down the hillside but we alter our trajectory to intersect with theirs and form a little tribe of Americans and Australians, wet and possibly lost, climbing stone steps that lead straight up a ravine into the fog. (An Englishwoman I  met the next day told me she has an OCD habit of counting steps and counted 950 before she quit.) The map says we are to climb, not to the top of the hill, but to the top of Loft Beck, that is, to the top of a creek.  Which is an odd concept, but sure enough, suddenly the creek disappears and we are at the top completely enveloped in cloud. 
       There is a strong suspicion that we are in the middle of a breath-taking landscape of mountain peaks. However, we could be on the moon for all we can see. The map tells us that what we need to find now are cairns. "Cairn" is a word of either Norse or Celtic derivation, I'm guessing, that means "a man-made pile of rocks in the middle of nowhere." They mark trails. They are made of locally sourced material.  When you're lost in the fog, spotting a cairn is immensely reassuring, take my word for it.  If the fog ever comes in so densely that you can't see from one cairn to the next, you might as well resign yourself to life up there with the sheep. 

      Eventually we traipse within sight and sound of civilization, an old slate mine turned museum/adventure sports center, and there's a cafe! Did I mention that one is disinclined to picnic in steady rain and so we have hiked all day without a bite since our (admittedly copious) English breakfast? But since it seems we are going to live after all, we are suddenly starving.  We sup on (hot!) potato and leek soup at the slate mine.  Best potato and leek soup ever. 

Coastacoastin' Day One

     "Are yous coastacoastin' ?" an old man on a village street asked us our first morning out, turning the trail into a verb.  The old guy was very astute.  The trail is definitively, legitimately, a verb if ever there was one.
       Coastacoastin'  following the hand drawn maps in the Stedman book is like a scavenger hunt.  First we're looking for a kissing gate. Found it? Then walk till you come to a creek.  Etc.  And In that manner we walked along the cliffs over the Irish Sea and turned inland to climb Dent Hill. 
        It was a rare convergence of clear weather and a mountaintop.  Walking up the hill, I felt the globe turning beneath my feet and the world spread out below us. All the little towns we had walked through were laid out like on a map, and beyond them the sea and the Isle of Man and the coast of Scotland.  If the hill had been a little higher and I squinted, maybe I could have seen Iceland and the US behind it.  
       Then we turned our backs, and started walking eastward to the North Sea. 

Going to St Bees

     It sounds like a nursery rhyme, "Going to St Bee's".   Only on a Sunday morning going from Keswick to St Bees by public transportation was very nearly a case of you can't get there from here.  
       The transport website that maps out trips for you could only sputter, " Leave early! Leave at 7:00!  Leave at 7:20!"  and quote bus schedules that don't exist or don't exist anymore.  Nevertheless,  we set out. 
        Having lived in Asia for awhile, one thing I enjoy about Northern Europe is that I can pass undetected, at least until I open my mouth and give the game away.  No one ever recoils in horror and shrieks "You're American!"   In fact, they rarely mention it at all but they probably think "Oh, so that's why she's so bloody ignorant!"  And they very kindly answer my dumb questions. 
         A lot of people apparently consider bus routes to be one of their areas of expertise.  They didn't always agree with each other, but they did try to help us.  And because we're in a different country where everything is a bit of a novelty, it wasn't so bad taking bus....after bus....after bus.  Three buses and six hours to go 31 miles.  But we got there, we got there. 
        Maybe we should have taken a taxi. 

Walking in the Lake District before walking

     We bought train tickets to Penrith in the States ahead of time (http://mobile.transportdirect.info/) which is the cheapest way, and it worked like a charm. They popped out of the self-serve ticket machine in the Manchester train station  on the first try. The train itself was another story. Just about the time our train was due, some poor soul was hit by a train on down the line but Virgin Trains did an excellent job of switching trains, switching tracks, and switching people about.
      In front of the Penrith station we caught a local bus and got on with a young Danish couple to whom I felt a bond.  After all, I'd spent at least 20 minutes in the Copenhagen airport just the day before! We discussed the Viking origins of place names in this corner of England and whether they resemble modern Danish. As we rolled through the hamlet of Threlkeld, he postulated that the name had something to do with slaves. (Wikipedia  translates it  as " the serf's well".)  So we arrived in Keswick with the return of the Vikings .
      Keswick is a town of slate  houses and slate shops and slate hotels at one end of Derwentwater. which anywhere else in the English speaking world would be known as a lake. (Keswick is pronounced "Kessick", by the way.  The "w" must have dissolved in the rain.)
     Yesterday we walked around the lake, probably because it's the simplest sort of walk to do and hard to lose your way. If you keep the lake to one side, 11 miles later you're going to find yourself back where you started.  It is magnificent, the great crags looming over the cold, clear water, but all in a most civilized, English way, the groomed trail, the perfectly placed bench.  The thick moss, ferns, rhododendrons, and sweet, ripe blackberries along the trail are reminiscent of the rainy valley where I grew up.  So was the  rain.   It rained all day and people put on their raincoats and went on with what they were doing, because that's how you live in Rain Country.

       One difference though is that at home the mountains are carpeted with forests of Doug Fir and their friends while the Lake District fells are pretty much treeless.  In the last few days I've heard Neolithic settlers and the local  Herdwick sheep blamed for the presumed deforestation. Which doesn't seem quite fair, since neither of the accused parties can defend themselves. ( Anyway, if the US Forest  Service auctions off  the logging rights pell-mell, the distinction will be moot.)
      After the circumambulation of Derwent, we stopped  by our B&B where the wonderful landlady had stocked our room with cookies and tea-makings and then we headed right back out in a steady downpour to see my personal reason for coming to Keswick: the Castlerigg Stone Circle. It is perhaps  a five mile walk there and back, partly on a country road sunk deep between the hedgerows and so narrow that two cars could not possibly pass each other. 
     It did not disappoint. The circle sits in the middle of a meadow with a 360 degree view of the fell peaks around it, half hidden in cloud.  Various websites date it randomly between 1500 and 4000 BCE.  It is much smaller than Stonehenge, but you can walk among the rocks, watched only by the caretenders,  sheep who work diligently keeping the grass around the ancient stones trimmed.
     I wish I could post pictures, but I can't download from the camera and IPhone pictures are not that great.  Besides, I know from sad experience that the brilliant engineering in the IPhone can be defeated by a single drop of water, so I didn't dare take it out of its plastic bag.
      A bit sodden, we walked straight back to town and into the slate and timbers pub on the square called (I am not making this up) The Dog and Gun.  It was absolutely mobbed with local people speaking their marvelous Viking flavored English, but not a wisp of tobacco smoke which just goes to show that there is positive change happening in the world.  There were dogs in the pub, but frankly, I don't think they were enjoying the experience.  They seemed cowed by the din and the boots and hid under the tables and in the corners. Everyone who was eating had the same dinner: a big, hot bowl of goulash with garlic bread. 
        It was a wet day, but it was a great day.

   
 

At the center of things

     Wherever you go in the world there are  people convinced that that particular place, no matter how unlikely, is the center of the universe.  We are in Manchester, England because that is the closest international airport to the start of the Coast to Coast trail.  We have few days before we begin walking tho and Manchester is a pleasant place to spend the day.  It also happens to be the Center of the Universe.  I bet you didn't know that.  
      The Museum of Science and Industry here makes  a persuasive argument that it is so. Manchester was the heartland of the British Industrial Revolution, which funded the expansion of the Empire which, among other things, arbitrarily drew the borders of nations that ultimately do not necessarily cohere, the most recent examples being Iraq and the tragedy that is Syria.  Is that stretching the filament of causation too fine?  Well, did you know that Frederich Engles arrived in Manchester in 1842 to document the misery of the factory workers and met with Karl Marx at Chetham's Library in downtown Manchester.  And you know what that led to: that whole Cold War thing.  
        Manchester has evidently long been a hotbed of liberalism and radical thinking, promoting  such dangerous ideas as universal suffrage and trade unions. The local newspaper, the Guardian, (liberal and not ashamed of it )  is not far off from its 200th year of publication.  The Guardian ( along with the Washington Post) published the revelations of Edward Snowden. (And a big thank you to both of them and let's hope Mr Snowden is making progress in learning Russian.  As a former Russian major myself, I'm sure he is since it takes a mind like a computer to process all those damn declensions.) 
       Perhaps I found the evidence of the centrality of Manchester to Everything particularly convincing because I haven't really slept in 30 hours.  And though we were at the museum at midday  in Manchester, it was 6:00 a.m. in the city from which our flight departed, Washington DC. Where, as it happens, there is a sizable contingent of people who believe in their hearts that they are the Center of the Universe.  

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.  

Getting from here to there, or somewhere

    My mother, like some Australian aborigines, claims to have an innate sense of exactly where she is at all times.   I, on the other hand, am directionally impaired.  If I make more than two turns, I no longer know where I was originally headed.  If I stop in a store while walking through a mall, I may very well head in the opposite direction when I leave it. Around here,  I rely on familiar landmarks and road signs to find my way. But the Coast to Coast trail, which is actually not a trail but a network of foot paths and roads, is notoriously un-signposted and certainly unfamiliar.  Uh-oh. Getting lost is a high stakes game if it means walking extra miles.

     Henry Stedman's book, cleverly named Coast to Coast Path, is the Bible for walkers. It’s written in English, which is a lot like American, except when it isn't. If ever an American edition is printed, we can hope that it will at least add a glossary. But that's what the Internet is for, I guess. 

     The charm and treasure in this book are the meticulous, hand drawn maps showing every step of the way. There are copious notations.  But will we know what a " small wooden pen round shaft" is when we see it?  There is one not far from a “ruined peat store". I don't know what peat stores look like even when they're not ruined.  There are the cryptically labeled "grouse butts", and “drumlins".  I can't wait to see these, whatever they are.

      There is testimony from walkers that claim these maps are all you need to find your way across England. I hope that's true.  Otherwise I'll be desperately looking for somebody with a GPS.

       I'd like to give you a peek at the Stedman maps but I'm pretty sure they're copy written. (Not that that ever stopped me when I was teaching. That's what copy machines were made for!).  Instead, as a tribute, here’s a map of the trails in the park-behind-our-house,  drawn in the same style:  

   
     Unfortunately, this map doesn't have any ghylls or scars, no sheepfolds, stiles, cairns or kissing gates. (The latter sound like a fun addition to hiking!)
     On the weekends, people in the park-behind-our-house often ask me for directions.  Usually they just want to know how to get back to their car.  

In shape for coming events. Or not.

   
 Sunday we walked to a lake in the woods behind our house and around it and then cut cross country to another lake, where my son works in the summer.  And then turned around and walked all the way, way back.  This is probably, umm, nine miles? ( or 14.4841 kilometers if you're from a logical country. )  The idea behind this trek was that our feet should be familiar with nine miles of walking if we are going to use them to walk across England.  

      The only silver lining in this project was that at the second lake, I can buy an ice cream bar and eat it in my son's air conditioned office and stay there until my core temperature falls within normal parameters. It was a fkg jungle hot sauna day.   

       England in September will likely not be so hot.  If you have to pick a country to walk across, you could do worse than England.  Of course, you don't have to pick a country to walk across. Reasonable people probably wouldn't.  

What would Wainwright wear?

   
     One reason soccer (AKA “football”) is a far finer game than the American kind of football is that it requires less stuff. Some good shoes and those cute knee socks and you’re ready to play. Where along the spectrum of stuff does the Coast 2 Coast trail fall?
     The first dilemma is footwear. We've tramped up and down and around a fair bit and I’ve always worn running shoes. (Known as “trainers” where we’re going.) On internet discussion boards devoted to the C2C there is impassioned debate between those who fervently believe in hiking boots, and other, somewhat fewer souls who stoutly maintain that hiking shoes (a step up from trainers, but still..) will suffice; they put spring in your step and make for greater agility. Well, they do. But the booted answer back in ominous tones, “Whut about the bogs?” Oh, there’s deep, deep muck where you're going and you’ll sink right in. Your wimpy shoes will be full of it and then you’ll wish you had on real boots! (I note that most of the voices in these discussions are male; draw your own conclusions.)
     The kind of stuff we’re talking about likes to be called “gear”. And as it happens, we have a real gear guru in the house, a son who definitely didn’t get the anti-stuff gene. He camps and kayaks, fishes and hunts and his gear is piled all over the basement and the garage. Go to REI, he said.
     Well, there they were on the shelf: soft boots, boots so soft  that don't remind me that one of my ankles was reconstructed with screws and bolts, boots so lacking in the pretension that they're big and tough that they're purple. But are they tuff enough for the boggy bits?
     They’re on probation. "Wear them around the house", I was told. I take them out of the box and lace them up, thinking I’ll wear them to vacuum. The big dog goes crazy. He’s never seen the purple boots before, but he’s no dummy. One look and he’s knows: those boots are tuff stuff! They mean we’re in for a real good tromp in the woods!  Well, who am I to doubt if the dog knows?
      The husband is not into stuff either. I hope he’ll buy rain gear, but I know he has visions of hiking along with just his trusty umbrella held aloft.

How slow can we go?

       It took a flurry of emails, and nearly drove me crazy, but I believe I have made reservations at farm B&B's and pubs and even a yurt, for 21 successive nights strung across the dark part of the map near Scotland like a thin line of Christmas lights.
      Yes, twenty-one nights. That's how long we plan for this walk to take. Twelve or thirteen days is traditional. That's the way Alfred Wainwright, (a guy who evidently didn't much like his job or family life and spent a lot his time tramping in the rain across northern England and eventually wrote the book on the C2C, ) that's how Alfred suggested doing it. But….we're on vacation! And being foreigners, we might find it a fascinating novelty to look at wet sheep.
     And not to put too fine a point on it, but my husband is retired. Actually, he's retiring. Again. This would be the third time but who's counting? And since his work involved a fair amount of sitting, he thinks it would be a fine thing if retirement involved walking. Rather leisurely walking by some measures.
     Anyway, I imagine that people who walk it in twelve days have something to prove. We don't.