It took a while to get started today. After yesterdays liberal soaking we got ourselves down to the pub for food (black pudding scotch egg, yum!), crashed out at the B&B, and were the accosted this morning by one of the biggest breakfasts so far. I have to admit that I scoffed at the suggestion in the guidebook that by the time the walk was half done, most people can't stand the sight of bacon and eggs, but maybe there's a grain of truth in there. Still, where we are tonight, kippers aren't on the menu, so it's same old same old tomorrow. Hard life, eh?
Breakfast polished off, I popped outside to fumigate my nose with best Virginia, and was immediately accosted by one of the owners two dogs, who dropped a tennis ball at my feet and laid down with furiously wagging tail. I mean, what's a bloke supposed to do? So, I obligingly lobbed the ball into the middle of the vegetable garden (not what I was aiming for, but there's a reason I never made the school cricket team) only to have the drool covered object deposited back at my feet seconds later. Floyd, Ted and Rowley take note. Eventually, Mike got fed up with waiting and fetched the dog's lead, with which he proceeded to drag me, protesting, off on today's route.
About an half an hour into the stoll, we noticed a traffic jam at one of the stiles in front of us. There's a bunch of folk on the walk who, if you were to judge a book by its cover, you would not have thought of as coast to coast walkers. They have a little trouble with the squeeze stiles popular in these parts, but take nothing away from them, they are completing the same stages that everyone else is. One of the nice things about this walk is that you do tend to run into the same people every day or so and, if you want to, you can walk together for a while, or just keep trekking. Today, that meant we ran into Phil and Ann again, and we carried on with them pretty much to the end of today's walk.
Round about midday, and halfway through the journey, we stopped off at a tearoom for a hot drink. Others had the same idea, the place filled up while we were there for the next hour (not the fastest service ever) but clearly we had the idea first, and the latecomers were just slaves to the trend we set! While chatting to a Dutch couple we found out they had spent the previous night in the B&B run by the people who owned the tea shop (spot a pattern here?) we dried out in yesterday. I mention this seriously uninteresting fact simply because I commented "oh yes, the blonde girl from Kent" to which Mike added "not a natural blonde, though". Visions of Sean Connery drily muttering about non matching collars and cuffs assault me, but I swear he was never out if my sight for more than two minutes...
Navigation is easy at this point. The walk is so popular that signs appear at regular intervals. Eventually, we rocked up at Richmond at two thirty or, perhaps more appropriately and in keeping with the title of today's post, tooth hurty*. For I have developed a nasty toothache. This isn't what I'd expected to suffer on the walk, though we've obviously been eating the miles (groan if you want to). It's not nice though, and as we were walking past a dentists I popped in for some advice, explaining that hot drinks were making the left side of my face explode in pain, while cold drinks were ok.
It happened that the person the dentist was waiting for hadn't turned up, which is how I found myself staring at the ceiling while an Austrian called Stephan hit each of my teeth in turn with what felt like a small sledgehammer. Eventually he declared he could see nothing wrong, recommended a toothpaste for sensitive hampsteads, and suggested I forsake coffee and stick to beer. What a jolly sensible fellow.
Richmond. Well, compared to the places we have overnighted so far, this is a teeming metropolis, with shops, pubs, restaurants, a castle and a big river with waterfalls on it. A couple of days ago, I posted a pic of Mike above a waterfall twenty, thirty miles back. Here he is again, downstream on the same river. It's all growed up now.
Tomorrow will be our longest walk, some twenty three miles or so, but reasonably flat. It'll be an early start, and will once again see us in the middle of nowhere at days end. Feet, knees, teeth and net access permitting, I'll post more when we get there.
I'm hoping (make that praying) that this walk is letting you get all the bad jokes out of the way.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear it's going well though.