| Hike Southbound through Britain with
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| Days S53 - S65 English West Country | |
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Monday,
April 21, 2008
Time of departure: 8.00 am Time of arrival: 4.30 pm Place departed: Sampford Peverell, Devon Place arrived: Shobrooke, Devon Miles: 18 Cum miles: 840.2 Percent complete: 86.5  The Beeches
B&B, Shobrooke ***Cost for bed and breakfast: £25 ($50) |
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| . The recordbreakers?
Well, I'm certainly not one.
But Don Gray shared some of his research with me. These are some of the more notable end-to-end journeys:
These figures compare with a typical walk
taking 60 to 85 days,
depending on the route and many other factors. Most routes fall in the
900 to 1300 miles range.
It drizzled most of today, drying in mid-afternoon. I had an uneventful day - first on B-roads to Cullompton, and then on country lanes to Shobrooke. The latter portion has many hills, which is what hiking in Devon and Cornwall is known for. The hills aren't individually very high, but they are incessant and they can be steep. Don Grey had advised me to go south to Exeter and then west to cross Dartmoor. Instead, I'm shaving miles on a southwesterly route, but perhaps not shaving effort. At Cullompton I visited a Somerfield supermarket, and bought sardines, cheese and a baguette, and a liter of orange juice which I wanted to drink soon since I was thirsty and it was heavy. I drank it in the shopping cart storage area since that offered shelter while it was raining, and made use of the Somerfield trash can. Hikers can't hop into a car and zoom home to a refrigerator-equipped kitchen with a roof overhead. You have to be a street-person to know what the streets are all about. Thorverton is one of those places which end-to-end routes seem to run through more than most other places. Near here, there's a much-photographed piece of countryside, which appears on hiking blogs. Someone (Alan Sloman?) has put the several photos on his site for comparison. It's such a pretty bit of country that I was planning to detour a couple of miles to take my own photo. But the rain would make the photo a poor one, and it certainly dampened my enthusiasm for the detour. Yesterday, I got an email from Dave and Sylvia Howes, who had made my John o' Groats arrival a memorable one last year. They advised me that the upcoming bank holiday (on May 5) would put pressure on West Country accommodation from May 1 to 6. This is something that I hadn't really thought about. It will be hard for me to finish before then, and it's also hard to book more than a couple of days ahead. For now, I'm just going to hope for the best. Shobrooke is a neat village in a valley in the middle of nowhere, and has no mobile phone service. Uploading my daily journal was delayed until the morrow. |
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| Day S56 © 2007 and 2008 Daryl May Day S58 | |