I can't seem to walk a straight line

Swindon turned out to be a bust on the cybercafé front.  Actually, I did find a couple of internet shops, and used one of them to check and send a little email, but it turned out that none of them would let me hook up my own computer or copy files onto their computer to send on.  People here either have had or fear problems with viruses pretty severely.  There was one place that might have been able to help me out, but they didn’t even open till noon.  I’m going to try to dial up on the house phone here next time Pat and I are both here and have time.  That means chapters will go up – I’ve got a big backlog, but no pictures.  I’m meeting Sara in Oxford on Sunday.  I reportedly have a good chance of finding a WiFi hotspot there.  We shall see.

 

At any rate, it was interesting to poke around a nearly tourist free English city for a change.  Swindon does draw steam railway enthusiasts, of which England has plenty, but not much of a touring crowd otherwise.  It got big on the railroads, and so nothing there is particularly old by local standards.

 

I headed out of town to the south, and found my way to Pewsey Wharf with only a few errors.  I stopped for a beer and a burger with mushy peas on the side.  Think of mushy peas as pea soup for which the food processor was turned off 10 seconds earlier than it normally would have been.  They are a normal accompaniment to fish and chips, though the man I ordered them from thought I was mad to have them with a burger.  I told him I was just trying to get some vegetables into my lunch, and they looked like the best bet.  I don’t expect it to catch on, but it wasn’t bad.

 

Fed and ready for the trail, I started west along the tow path of the Kennet and Avon canal.  It was a jaw dropping day.  Only a few puffy clouds moving slowly across the sky, temperature in the middle 70’s, light breeze – this kind of thing is not normal around here, as people kept telling me.

 

This wasn’t entirely unlike the Leeds and Liverpool that I walked along around East Marton up in the Pennines.  Like most of the canals in the UK, these started in the 17th and 18th centuries to move bulk goods around.  They were packed with traffic and mostly made their owners and investors very wealthy.  Then the railroads killed them dead until quite recently when they started being redeveloped for the leisure and houseboat resident trade. 

 

I was cranking along the tow path at about 3 and 1/3 miles per hour, enjoying the weather and the view.  For much of the way, the ground to either side of the path was thick with queen anne’s lace spiced up with other wildflowers.  Not like you need waymarks on a canal towpath, but it really was as though the plants were there to decorate the trail.

 

I wrote yesterday morning that I wanted to see how far I could go on the flat, and that was exactly the goal I started with.  The town of Devizes was something like 11 miles away, and I thought I might potentially get there and back or at worst catch a cab or bus back from Devizes.  However, the fact is that once you’ve walked about 4 miles of a canal, it all starts to look like a canal.  There are diversions.  The boats that are tied up or chugging along are interesting.  There are fish.  I saw something that I think was nearly 4 feet long cruising just below the surface.  Every so often there’s a bridge or a chance to see the landscape higher up.

 

It was that last that got took me off the canal.  Ahead and to the north, I saw one of the chalk horses.  These are big white drawings of horses done by cutting out a horse shape in the chalky hillsides.  There are a fair number of them scattered around Wiltshire.  I think the leading theory is that they were put up at the inducement of some kind of pre-historic equestrian warlord and were intended to remind everyone who could see them that he was a big deal and that they should all keep working hard or his benefit.

 

Seeing the horse made me look above on the map, and it promised a number of barrows and such in some modest hills just a little way from the canal.  I looked at the foot paths, and figured I could piece together a round about way back to Pewsey Wharf.  I also remembered that the place where I had parked said it was only good for 4 hours.  It didn’t seem as though anyone was paying attention, but I had a change of heart about pushing my luck.  By doing this loop I was envisioning, I thought I could get back to the car in good time to beat any 4 hour police who might exist.

 

I headed north at the next bridge crossing at a place called Honeystreet.  That took me up to Alton Barnes.  At the church there, I met some very fit looking elders on bicycles.  They were very excited, because they’d found a stone that made part of a fence that had crop circle type shapes carved into it – circles with various protuberances on them linked into a barbell with other circles.  They proudly told me that Alton Barnes is the crop circle capital of the UK, possibly of the world.  We both agreed that most if not all such circles are the work of ingenious people with boards on ropes, but that if any of them are created by extra terrestrials, they just be some kind of return communication from the white horses. 

 

Observation on these two – I’m terrible at guessing ages, but I’d be surprised if either of them was less than 65.  They weren’t notably athletic looking, but they were pushing along on spiffy high tech bicycles, dressed as though for a cover of Cycling Digest or something like that.  Older people here are, I believe, more willing to look sporty.  Some of it may be an appropriateness thing.  This attire may be viewed as the proper outfit for cycling.  I also think, though, that older Americans live in fear oftrying to look younger than they are, which sells them a lot of Lands’ End and Norm Thompson (corrected motto: Escape to the Ordinary) clothing leading them to look older than they are.  I claim no certain knowledge, but I do think I’m seeing the results of some kind of real difference.

 

Anyway, they pedaled off, wishing me safety from the flying saucers.  I found the head of my footpath and walked up into the hills.  I should have learned by now that what the ordinance survey people put on the map as a prehistoric barrow will look to me like just a hill, while some things that look to me far too regular to be natural are on the map as ordinary hills.  I had a nice walk.  The views were pretty and the air clear.  I saw vast yellow fields full of what I was again reminded today is flowering rape (from which rape seed oil or, as the Canadians renamed it to avoid that admittedly ugly name, canola).  Seeing whole fields of this yellow bordering fields of green wheat made the landscape look like an abstract painting.  I also got to see the north sides of a few hills I’d seen from the south along the canal.  There are benefits to walking higher up.

 

I made one wrong turn, but had gone nearly a quarter of a mile before I figured it out.  On further consideration, I decided it was a short cut anyway.  It meant I had a mile or so along a road, but it turned out to be a very quiet road, so no problems. 

 

I got back to the Canal about a mile from where I’d started and spun back up to full speed for a good flat stride to the car.  I got out a few minutes ahead of the 4 hour police who, if they even existed, were still pretty stealthy.  There wasn’t a meter maid waiting to plant a ticket on my window turning away in bitter dismay when I showed up or anything.  I didn’t mention before, but this is essentially what happened when I got back to the car in Swindon with 10 minutes left on my pay and display parking permit.  It was really the specter of her baffled fury that changed my mind about pressing my luck.  Was she so determined she had followed me to catch me out elsewhere?  Of course not.

 

The drive back to the farm was uneventful.  I’m getting pretty comfortable with this rural driving.  I drive only as fast as I am comfortable with.  If anyone is trailing me who clearly wants to go faster, I pull over and let him by at the earliest opportunity.  When the road is too narrow for two cars to pass at speed, I always fade over onto the shoulder and let the other guy go.  Being on the left is no longer weird.  It’s really just the narrowness of a lot of the country lanes, and my rules make that manageable.

 

The Radnor Arms is the pub in Coleshill – the village closest to the farm.  I walked over there across the fields for dinner.  The evening was still great weather, so outside tables were filling up fast.  I saw another couple looking for a place when everything was full.  I asked if they’d care to join me, since it seemed a shame to make anyone eat indoors in such weather.  They wound up being splendid company. 

 

Tom works for some kind of container and seal company headquartered in Pennsylvania.  His wife Barrett works a few hours a day in a bakery and as far as I could gather otherwise keeps house and spoils their German shorthaired pointer, to whom I was never formally introduced.  He was whining for them from the back of their car.  Barrett collected him, fed him his supper, then walked him around occasionally giving his middle a complicated squeeze until he managed to give a good belch at which time she brought him back to the table where he sat quietly.

 

While all the dog continuity was going on, my phone rang.  It was Sara.  She and I agreed to meet in Oxford instead of Stratford on Avon.  I hadn’t figured out before just how close I would be to Oxford and it’s got easier trains from London for her.  I am looking forward eagerly to seeing her on Sunday.

 

We had a wide ranging conversation, mostly about vacations and walking, but stopping at other ports as well. 

 

Eventually, they drove off and I walked back across fields that were only starting to darken at almost 9:30 pm.  It was still so nice out I left by window open and was droned to sleep by what I have since learned is a very troubling bee hive the farm owners are trying to get out from under their roof slates. 

 

 

Garmin Facts:  10 miles, 3:14, 20, 3.1 mph, 2.8 mph, 163 meters climbed.  Add a mile and a half for the round trip to the pub for a day total of 11.5 miles.