Continued

I made a mess of the tub cleaning my boots and gaiters, then cleaned the tub out and ran a good hot bath where I soaked through a chapter of Jane Eyre.  I mean of course that I stayed in the tub long enough to read a chapter rather than that I dropped the book in, but the double meaning pleased me enough to prefer to explain it rather than rewrite it.

 

Feeling human again, I padded down to the casual bar in my slippers where you already know that I had dinner and wrote.  What I kept from you last night was that as I had dinner I also got to eavesdrop on the manager interviewing a young couple about plans for their upcoming nuptials.  She was very good at her job, leading them through and into all sorts of expensive extras.  They looked a handsome couple, though the bride had exactly the accent of Bubble from Absolutely Fabulous.  I keep encountering this accent in the wild, but manage each time to convince myself later I must have been dreaming and it must be a straight on parody.  The key feature of the accent for those of you who haven’t seen the show is a sort of grace note up and back down in the middle of every long vowel, as though expressing shocked horror, but in fact used in all weathers.  Again, unplanned dinner theater.

 

Garmin Facts:  16.6 Miles walked in 6:38 moving and 1:30 stopped for 2.5 mph moving, 2.0 mph average.  828 meters climbed.  Call it four meters to a flight of stairs and that’s 200 flights.

 

I report with shock that when I checked out this morning, after a lovely breakfast of poached egg and smoked haddock, there was nothing on the bill for the telephone time I used to update the journal and check email last night.  Usually, this is a major source of income for British hotels, pounds a minute sometimes.  I guess these people just make it in buckets off wedding parties, so they don’t chisel on incidentals.  I hasten to add that they earn whatever presumably princely sums they charge weddings.  The place is gorgeously kept and they couldn’t do enough for me.  I asked this morning whether they could organize me a taxi, and the woman at reception said she’d as soon drive me over herself.  As it happened, the fellow to pick up my bags arrived just as we were walking out, so he took me instead; but the hotel was all set to do it.

 

I’m determined to get caught up tonight, and it seems to me not all that much could have happened today, so I’m going to press on through. 

 

From the trailhead, I had a long, steady climb into a boulder field that stretched for more than a mile.  I spent much of that on a different kind of improved trail where they seem to have put down landscapers cloth then piled on pea gravel.  When I eventually get pictures associated with this, one of them will be captioned “Change is good” showing the old, only a pig could love it track to the left and the new civilized track to the right.  If I seem to be obsessed with the condition of the surface I’m walking on, I promise you that after about 45 miles of this kind of walking, it would start to dominate your thinking as well.  Every step into soupy muck wearies me in two ways.  First, I know that eventually, I’m going to slip and fall in a patch of it, and the suspense of whether this will be the time is wearing.  Second, I know that I’ll eventually have to scrub it off my boots. 

 

The Way continued across the moor tops, but had to descend frequently to cross roads.  This was the clearest day I’d had yet – a certain amount of sunshine was even forecast.  This did give some lovely views of the surrounding country, but too often that country was cluttered with abandoned looking factories waiting for my Thursday morning breakfast companions.  I was walking through the industrial suburbs of Manchester which fade into the same sort of thing from the next town on, whatever it is.  The only benefit to the industrial collapse of the north midlands is that the way was not thick with factory smoke as it would have been a few decades ago.  The guidebook points out that the rocks through this stretch are blacker than elsewhere not because they are different in origin but because a century of soot darkened them.

 

I’ve been seeing very few walkers, or other humans of any sort outside of cars.  I did see a wildlife biologist dipping muck out of a pond with a net and poking through it to count creatures.  Some kind of Health of the Moor study, no doubt.  He looked like he was enjoying his work.  I was once on a track to do that sort of work myself, mostly through infatuation with Jacques Cousteau movies.  I’m probably happier than I would have been, but nice to see that if there is an alternate reality me who took that track, he’s probably having a good life as well.

 

 

Mid morning, I saw my four companions well ahead of me.  However, the guide had told me there was a tea van at one of the road crossings ahead, and I thought I had them sufficiently figured out to guess they would stop there.  They did, and I made up a lot of the gap while they had tea.  I closed the rest by really pounding up the rise from that road cut and caught up with them on a stony hilltop called Robin Hood’s Bed.  They were resting on some very unmattresslike rocks.  I pulled out my binoculars and climbed a rock to scan the area ahead.  Donald asked me what I was looking for.  I told him I was trying to find out whether I could see the pub from here.

 

I knew that would excite them.  The White House Inn would be the first pub the trail actually called on.  They finished their regimented 5 minute break while I was still taking photos and drinking almost a full liter of water.  I also paused to take pictures of what may or may not be a roman road.  There’s no real doubt the legions built the roadbed, but the surface may have been renewed in the 11th century or thereabouts.

 

I never caught them up again until the pub.  Gary very kindly bought a round for all five of us while Donald and Philippe poured over their trip notes.  The one real benefit to the way they’re doing the trail as compared to my approach (aside from the dubious moral advantage of carrying another 30 pounds on their backs) is that they can go on or stop as conditions and their stamina dictate, whereas I have planned stops.  The weather was gorgeous and the going easy,so they were laying plans to go on to Ponden, which I’m not due to reach till tomorrow.  At minutes after noon with only one big descent and climb back up in between, it seemed feasible. 

 

Gary was a little concerned that they might have trouble finding lodging arriving too late.  They had phone numbers for a number of farms that put up campers.  I loaned them my phone to confirm availability and make a non-binding reservation, which removed their last worry.  We all set out, and I walked and chatted with different ones of them for another mile or so till they stopped for lunch.  I had a snack as well, but then walked on until the turning that took me down into Mankinholes. 

 

I ran into an older fellow walking the other direction along the reservoir wall.  He stopped and asked me whether I was walking the Pennine Way.  I said I was, and that little bit of speech was enough to make it clear that I’m American.  He asked where I was from and when answered told me he had a daughter who used to live in Ellicot City, Maryland, then moved to Atlanta, and is now in Florida.  As a result, he had been to DC a few times, and declared it a nice place to visit.  I agreed with him and told him I was also finding the Pennines a nice place to visit.  He does a lot of local hill walking and is doing the Pennine way on the installment plan with a group of friends every Wednesday.  They drive to a trail head in the morning, walk for a bit, then either take public transport back to where they parked or walk back.  He wished me well, and assured me I’d do well.  The age of people I see walking over these moors really sets a standard for the kind of shape I hope to be in in my seventies.  Although, maybe there’re all fifty and all the hill walking has just aged them.  Comforting thought, but I can’t put much faith in it.

 

The guide recommends going down something called the Calderdale Way that comes down from the Pennine Way like a ski slope.  I saw some other trails on my map that let me sneak down a little more gradually.  I wound up coming into town along the Pennine Bridleway, a sort of relative of the footpath that allows horses and insane cyclists.  Happily, Mankinholes is just around the corner of the valley that goes rural again, so I walked down through magnificent drystone walled pastures. 

 

Garmin Facts:  14.3 miles walked in 4:53 walking and 1:07 standing around.  Moving average of 2.9 mph (that’s what a lot of level ground and determination to catch up with someone else will do for you) and 2.4 mph average.  549 meters climbed.

 

I got within 100 yards of Cross Farm based on the sketchy directions Alan provided, then phoned for a little terminal guidance.  Shower.  Dinner at the Top Bank pub while working on this, and I’m caught up.  The Friday night crowd is starting to build up, so I think I’ll leave this table and bring joy to two lives.

 

Bit of advice.  Never walk a bridle way in sandals.  Useful thing to know. 

 

Cheers.