It may seem from the number of rainy-day and/or grayish photos here that the hike as a whole was pretty uncomfortable. Far from it! We actually had very pleasant weather for walking most of the time – the temperature was absolutely perfect, as you can probably see from the number of photos in which everyone is hiking in t-shirts – and we had enough sun than most of us had varying degrees of sunburn on at least one of the days! The rain that we did have was light for the most part, and not unpleasant – the main exception being the afternoon of the final day, and at that point we were so excited to be completing the hike that we would probably have happily hiked through a blizzard!
Before we’d completed two days of St. Cuthbert’s Way, we had already decided that we would love to repeat the experience some day. Not for the same hike, though I certainly wouldn’t rule out walking it again some day. But of course there are many more multi-day hikes in Britain, and I strongly suspect that one or more of those may be in our future. In any case, Bethany and I are planning to continue our morning walks to work back in the U.S., at least one day a week – we’ve found those extremely pleasant, and a great way to keep in shape. And for our remaining week of this trip to the U.K., our plans are already changing somewhat from the usual somewhat lazy schedule. We usually do walk once to Dunstanburgh Castle (the castle that is visible from the garden of our family’s cottage in Embleton), but this time the walk may continue on to the next village down the coast, then inland for dinner at a favorite restaurant, then back via the roads to Embleton … We’re also fond of wandering around local churchyards in search of gravestones offering clues to family history, but we generally get to those churchyards by car – this time Bethany has a book of “Northumberland church walks” so we may be reaching some of those locations on foot.
For a future long-distance walk … The Pennine Way, at 200-odd miles, is a bit of a stretch. We thought about St. Oswald’s Way, which runs more north-south along the coast of Northumberland, and sounds lovely, but that one is 97 miles – still a little more than we’d easily be able to do on a single trip. But there are others – for example, there are many very beautiful walking paths in the Lake District. And in the local area, there is the Northumberland Coast Path, which covers 58 miles over six days. Piece of cake! 🙂
Hmm – I wonder if the URL “www.northumberlandcoastpath2019.com” is available …
