Missing persons and the trials of a hotelier

I’m writing this on the train that just pulled out of Penrith station.  You’ll find in the course of the narrative why I got no writing done Saturday or Sunday nights. 

 

I decided in the end not to hitch back to the trail head from the hotel.  The walk along the road was a significant chunk of the whole day’s walk, and I felt sure that on Saturday morning, traffic would be lighter.

 

At breakfast at the hotel, I wound up sitting near a large group of people – two men, two women, three girls, and a boy.  I’m guessing two of the adults were siblings.  I saw them going over a clipboard of pages each of which had a photo of a building and then a bunch of data presumably about that building.  I heard them talking about times of day they were to be at different places.  I concluded they were shopping for a property somewhere in the area and were somehow striving to make it a holiday trip as well.  I walked out while they were still trying to figure out how to sneak in a couple of the tourist things the kids wanted to do.

 

The walk along the road was unpleasant, but I was right about less traffic.  I was also walking along the south side of the road so as to be facing traffic, and the verge there was wider and smoother.  I was back to the trailhead and walking away from the road in a little over half an hour.  This put me back out on Bowes Moor.  Fortunately, it wasn’t an exceptionally soggy stretch.  Not a lot of scenery to talk about.  The weather was lovely, and the going was fairly easy. 

 

Midday, I walked by a couple of other reservoirs.  One of them was bordered by a bunch of nature reserve.  There were piles of birds and rabbits.  I had to step right over a nesting bird at one point.  I think she was a grouse hen, but I hadn’t seen one so close before, so I’m not sure.  Her little ones were out on an expedition on the ground around her, so I stepped very carefully.

 

After the reservoirs, I was back into pasture.  I ran into a group of two couples somewhere between 65 and 75, I believe. I talked with one of the fellows for a while.  He had walked the Way in its early days – before most of the trail improvements I had benefited from.  He was still very complimentary to me for doing it at all, even if it was softened up.  I was impressed with the details he remembered about particularly troublesome and particularly pleasant parts of the trip.  They were making a little slower time than I was, but they were walking the same path.  One thing this trip has done is harden my determination to stay in shape. 

 

It really seemed like no time at all until I was walking down into Middleton in Teesdale where I was to stop for the night.  Middleton is an extremely pretty little town that was built on lead mining, so probably at the cost of a large number of lives.  Mining ended a long time ago, and now it’s a farming center and tourist destination.  The few miles of the Tees west of Middleton has a range of walking paths and is very popular.

 

I stayed at the Teesdale Hotel, which had been trading as an inn under a variety of names since the 17th century.  I checked in and got into town clothes then wandered around admiring buildings and parks and taking advantage of a lot of benches.  I ran into Donald who was in town waiting for his son John to show up.  They had scheduled to meet in Middleton on Saturday afternoon then walk on to Forest in Teesdale to catch back up with Philippe, Gary, and Pieter.  I had afternoon tea in the bakeshop, and when I came out, Donald was still there waiting. 

 

I poked around a little used book shop and picked up a 1967 guide to the Cotswolds I thought it might be interesting to compare to what I find there now. 

Some of the members of the group I’d sat near at breakfast were in the same shop and edged away as though afraid I’d been following them.

 

Literary side note:  I did finish Jane Eyre, and I feel like I did two traditional British ordeals – the Pennine Way and it.  I was feeling fairly done with the Brontes, but when I finished it, I still wanted to do some reading, so I went ahead and dipped in to Wuthering Heights.  Turns out it is very engaging, and I do feel a slight connection to it having walked over the very moors in which it is set. 

 

Another slow circuit of the market and I still found Donald waiting.  In the end, John never did show up.  Donald wound up booking himself a room at the Teesdale Hotel and making periodic calls home to Canada to try to get news.  What seemed likeliest was that John had landed in Manchester as planned and found that the bus service up to Durham on a Saturday wasn’t running. 

 

We wound up sitting in the lounge bar of the hotel talking and reading.  There were electricians working on what looked like four or five sedimentary layers of fuse boxes and circuit breakers usually hidden behind wall panels there in the bar.  The general manager saw me looking at the work and stopped by.  He rested a hand on my shoulder and said “You didn’t know you’d booked in to Fawlty Towers, did you?”

 

In the course of the evening, we became acquainted.  Turns out he worked for years as an engineer, but got tired of the commute down to Manchester.  A friend of his from Newcastle has had some success as a property developer.  When he bought the hotel in Middleton, he was offered the job of managing it.  He’s been at it just 5 months and has come to discover that while the building has a fabulous basic structure and unbeatable location, a lot of the systems need major repair. 

 

His Saturday had started with a plumber working on the auxiliary hot water boiler.  This introduced a leak that shorted a pump that shut down electrical power to half the hotel.  This took much longer to diagnose than it’s taking me to tell.  Eventually, they found the fault, took the pump out of the electrical circuit and had everything working again.  Not before the cook had to make me a lamb curry by candle light, apparently.  He was just about all in, and conversation with a couple of strangers appealed to him.  He told us much of the story I’ve recounted in the past two paragraphs and said if he had too many more days like this he’d be packing it in.  I stepped into my role as Perspective Man and suggested that in the old days, he probably burned just as much time and generated just as much frustration in just six or seven days worth of commuting.  This legitimately seemed to make him feel better.  He wound up giving Donald and myself a tour of the cellars, including the beer cellar where it is a year round 50 degrees from the depth and an underground stream by the look of things.  He also showed us the roots of the staircase – all English oak and painted in the public parts of the hotel.  He wants to get the paint off to show the wood again.  The most interesting bit was that some of the cellar doors still have their original, wooden bodied locks, still working.

 

In the end, we all talked till nearly 10, by which time I was nearly exhausted.  A little bit of reading and to sleep.

 

Garmin Facts:  12.2 miles in 4:48 walking, 44 resting.  2.5mph moving.  2.2 mph overall.  524 meters climbed.