Week 1: Land's End to Newquay, or A Rough Start

I hope you all know how much I love you: I'm typing out this whole thing on mobile.

By a show of hands, how many of you have read A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson? I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't. It is, in my opinion, Bryson's best and funniest work. Anyway, the bit relevant to this post is this: Bryson and his travel buddy Katz are walking the Appalachian Trail. Despite some difficulties, things are going well. And then they get to one of their stopovers, the visitor center for which has a floor-to-ceiling map of the Appalachian Trail. They then realize two things: first, that despite several weeks of walking, they are barely a foot off the ground per this map; second, that they are never going to finish the whole thing.

Here's the thing, though: the second realization doesn't make them feel disappointed. Instead, it makes them feel RELIEVED. Now that they know they can't finish the whole thing, it means they don't have to; they can just do the bits they're the most excited for and most want to do instead.

I had my Bill Bryson moment on the third day of this walk.

I must take some ownership here before I go on. I did not plan my route through southwest England well. I figured I'd take the coast path and that would be that, not realizing just how difficult the coast path is. And it is difficult: frequently rocky underfoot, ascending and descending precipitously into every cove, clinging to every headland like Overly Attached Girlfriend. The path is often vague, frequently accompanied by other paths crisscrossing the hillsides and cliff tops. It is also poorly waymarked, making it difficult to tell whether you're on the correct path at any given time. Simply put, the Southwest Coast Path is a bitch.

I thought roadwalking might be a viable alternative, but that has not been the case.  Roadwalking is very hard on one's feet, and comes with its own obvious risks (i.e. CARS).

So on the third morning of my walk, instead of setting out for Gwithian from St Ives, sunburned, blistered, and in pain, I had a leisurely morning in St Ives and did some serious thinking and soul-searching. And here is what I decided.

I'm going to continue dotting through Cornwall on foot and via bus for another week or so, because despite the trials of the past week, this is a really beautiful part of the world and I am enjoying it. And then I'm going to skip ahead and resume my walk at Sedbury, the southern trailhead of the Offa's Dyke Path. I'm not committing myself to compleating from there - in fact I think it's likely that once I've finished however much of Offa's Dyke takes my fancy, I will probably skip right on up to Scotland. There is a big swath of Scotland that I do want to finish, so that will probably be the new "serious business" part of my walk. I may even decide to tack on another Scottish long-distance path that was just opened earlier this year, and which has piqued my interest.

So that's the meat of my past week. When I have access to a real computer I'll transcribe my journal entries, but I wanted to go ahead and get my altered plan out there first.

Cheers, y'all.