Saturday, June 21st
Yesterday was the penultimate day on this Coast to Coast walk. Well, it was supposed to be. Last night, we decided to end our walk. We are sunburned, sore and exhausted, and we have nothing to prove to anyone. Today's walk would have been almost 20 miles with 2400 feet of climbing, which is way beyond what we would want to do or could do. Instead, we will walk about three miles to catch a train and then a bus to Robin Hood Bay, the designated end for the Coast to Coast walk. We have a hotel booked there for two nights. We are looking forward to some rest and maybe even a swim in the North Sea.
Having Sara and Andrew (Therese's niece and her husband) along has made keeping up with this journal a challenge, but their company for the last three days helped make those days more tolerable. As I write this entry, I am sitting at a small dining table in a hotel room, a hotel room downstairs below a pub whose noise kept me up until midnight and smells of sewage. The low point of the places we have stayed. I hope that our belongings do not pick up the odor.
Among the many challenges of this walk and my efforts to keep a journal of the trip, using the mobile app version of Squarespace has been one of the most consistent. Looking back at my efforts, I am frustrated by my inability to keep the days and dates of this walk consistent. One or two posts are in the wrong order, and the app will not allow me to move them—grrr!
I am collapsing the last two posts into one because the walks were so similar that I can not keep them straight in my mind. They were thirteen miles long along abandoned railway and dirt road sections that had been re-graveled with large stones!. Each walk had a steep climb up to a ridge top, where we would walk with no shade or protection from the wind, and then finish with a steep descent into the village, where our less-than-satisfactory accommodations were.
The ridges were covered with bog, grasses and heather. The heather was starting to blossom, so there were periodic areas of beauty. Still, we were walking among 12 inches or less of uninteresting vegetation while looking down at verdant green valleys. The challenge of walking an abandoned railway is that you can see ahead just how far there is to go, and then you round a corner, and there is even further to go—it felt like it would never end.
Hopefully, my next post will be more upbeat, and I will find the motivation to take more photographs. Here is the link to the few images I made:
https://www.reedpikephotography.com/coast-to-coast-photos/june-21st