Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
To pickpocket Dickens, it was a beginning; it was an ending. One August, Chris and I joined
ten other mis-assorted people and a guide, to walk the Coast to Coast Way. This is a walk
devised by British hiking legend, Alfred Wainwright, across the north of England from St.
Bees on the west coast to Robin Hood's Bay on the east. By walk, there is a little element of
British understatement here: this is no meander along reticent hedgerows or a bucolic ramble
across fields of wildflowers; it's hard walking, often over very challenging terrain.
By some celestial coincidence, the stars for a dozen people had aligned; our lives would fo-
cus on this endeavor for a brief spell, before scattering across the globe.
It was the end of a lifetime of unplanned preparation. It was the beginning of a one hundred
and ninety-two mile journey that ended in the North Sea, and also led us all to who knows
where. Some fates or forces had molded us into the kind of people who would attempt the
Coast to Coast. Some planetary congruence, some elemental finger had prodded, beckoned,
tugged us toward this journey, simple and yet profound. Or perhaps, I romanticize, we met,
when otherwise we would not have done, we walked, and then we parted.
We greeted our fellow travelers one evening at a Bed and Breakfast in St. Bees. We sized
each other up—an odd lot, unremarkable in many ways. No Olympians or superheroes, just
a bunch of tough folk, mostly peering at the wrong side of “middle” in middle age. No one
said a great deal during that first anticipatory meal. We digested each other as we digested
the Cumberland sausage. Like it, we were plain, yet spiced. Spiced with determination, ap-
prehension, courage, awe, and fear. We were three men and nine women, (plus Pete, our
guide), and we hailed from Britain, Ireland, Switzerland, Australia and the United States.
Walking the Coast to Coast is not like scaling the Himalayas, but for most ordinary people
nor is it something you do on a wing and a prayer; it is a response, a debt of gratitude that
you choose to pay for getting up in the morning and putting one foot in front of the other.
Most of us, perhaps all, had already come a long way.
For me, as I suspect for many, it had all started years ago. Almost imperceptibly the hiking
seed had been planted that one day would twine into the vine of this new adventure. Per-
haps it was the day my dad had taken us for a “little” walk. We were on a caravan holiday
in the Lake District. I was perhaps ten years old. The day dawned like a picture postcard, a
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