I AWOKE bright and early in my dodgy-yet-pretentious hotel room feeling very hungry indeed. I had gravely miscalculated in not stopping to eat before getting to the hotel on Saturday night, despite passing a plethora of restaurants in Torquay, and had then felt too tired to go out and look for food upon arriving there. In consequence, I had gone to bed early on a sumptuous dinner of one packet of crisps and my body was demanding calories before it conquered any more hills.
Tag: statue
XXVI – Durdle Door to Weymouth
SATURDAY’S walk marked the first occasion on these coastal perambulations on which I have not completed a section purely as a day trip. A friend, whom we shall here call ‘Alice’, has asked me several times when I’ll have to stop day-tripping and start staying over, and the answer is apparently now.
VIII – Dover to Sandling
FOLLOWING last Saturday’s fun and games, in which I came interestingly close to not so much shuffling off this mortal coil as slipping from it, I decided that I would continue my excursion around the Kentish coast. After all, the weather forecast was ‘sunny intervals with rain later’ and I still had more lovely cliffs to walk, with their slippery-when-wet clay topsoil.
As it happened, the rain didn’t even try to make a showing until after I’d come down from the cliffs and for this I was glad because one or two of them were quite scary enough as it was (I don’t like heights all that much and at a couple of points there was about a foot and half between the edge of the path and a very long way down.
Continue reading “VIII – Dover to Sandling”VII – Sandwich to Dover
TODAY I learned a terribly important lesson about the White Cliffs of Dover…
Do not walk them in the rain.
I also learned that while the Met Office is one of the world’s best weather forecasters, and not at all the running joke it was when I was little, they are still not always right. Today’s forecast for Kent was mostly for ‘sunny intervals’ giving way to rain tonight. What we actually got was intermittent showers giving way to rain by about four o’clock.
Continue reading “VII – Sandwich to Dover”I – Gravesend to Strood
YESTERDAY, I had a plan to get up bright and early and perambulate part of the Saxon Shore Way from Gravesend to Strood in Kent.
Not out of the blue, you understand, but as part of a wider project. I have long wanted to walk the South West Coast Path, which is some distance from me (I live in London). But then, I wondered, could I walk to the SWCP?
From there it was a short mental step (and a promise of many physical ones) to wonder why I should stop there? A vague intention to walk the coast of Great Britain emerged. Well, more-or-less; I’m no purist about these things.
But first things first…
Continue reading “I – Gravesend to Strood”