5/15/08

Coty and Breanne's Walk Across England

The Coast to Coast across northern England from St. Bees to Robin Hood's Bay is a 192 mile walk based off the path that Alfred Wainwright walked and wrote about in the '70's. Wainwright was an avid walker and writer and wanted to try to walk across England using only public right of ways. While not an official trail (Wainwright himself encourages people to make up their own ways of getting from one coast to the other), people come from all over to try it and it is considered one of the best long distance walks in the world.




So how, you ask, did this whole idea come about? Why would we want to walk practically 200 miles across England in almost non-stop rain? It all started my (Coty) first quarter in college. Being in a new place where I didn't know anyone or about anything equaled lots and lots of time on the computer. Which is how I stumbled across a web site about the Coast to Coast walk. I knew then that I wanted to try it and kept it in the back of my mind for three years. Then in my last year of school, after hearing from a friend who had just spent the fall in Ireland and another who had biked to Mexico, I decided that I was just going to do it. I graduated in June 2007 and a week later, there we were, Breanne (my sister) and I, riding a train from Manchester to St. Bees to start our adventure. I don't know why walking across a country appealed to me. I had been to England once before and loved the countryside. I also like to be outdoors and wanted to do something that would challenge me. And how many people can say they walked across a country?!

This blog is an online documentation of our trip. I've borrowed directly from journal entries and e-mails that I sent to people along the way (with some editing of course!). I have tried my best to condense each day into a readable length without compromising too much detail. Also, blogspot automatically scales down these pictures, but if you click on a photo, a larger version will show up for you to examine more closely if you so desire! And if you want to hear more about something in particular, just e-mail me!

Feel free to scroll down the page, or you can click the links below or on the sidebar to get to each day's individual entry (or if you just like pictures, each day has a link to more pics). Also, if you choose to go to each individual page, at the bottom the link "newer post" will take you to the previous day and "older post" will take you to the next day:

Day 0: Getting to St. Bees
Day 1: St. Bees to Ennerdale Bridge
Day 2: Ennerdale Brige to Stonethwaite
Day 3: Stonethwaite to Grasmere
Day 4: Grasmere to Patterdale
Day 5: Patterdale to Shap
Day 6: Shap to Orton
Day 7: Orton to Kirkby Stephen
Day 8: Kirkby Stephen to Keld/Muker
Day 9: Muker/Keld to Reeth
Day 10: Reeth to Richmond
Day 11: Richmond to Ingleby Cross
Day 12: Ingelby Cross to Clay Bank Top
Day 13: Clay Bank Top to Glaisedale
Day 14: Glaisedale Robin Hood's Bay
Day 15: Excursion to Whitby
EXTRA GOODIES!!














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