Barbara and Tom: Birdlip to Painswick

The hill of death.

I blocked it out of my mind.

To get to our B&B last night, we had to walk up a hill on a narrow road with no edge. Cars were traveling pretty darned fast, even with (we later saw) signs that said "Pedestrians Ahead, Use Caution." Yeah, right.

Then we had to cross a busy street with a blind turn. Yaaaaa! I said as I ran across the street. Then we had to run briefly down that street (no sidewalk, border, or edge) against traffic to get to a "private sidewalk" to get to the point where we could cross the road (dodging traffic) to get to our B&B. Yaaaaa! I said as I ran into the face of death. Private sidewalk? Officer, just arrest me now.

Guess what we had to do this morning! Right. We had to reverse our path. We looked death in the face twice!

Actually, it turns out we didn't have to face it the second time, if only we had known. After we'd been on The Way for about 15 minutes this morning, we were joined by a broader path that came from the same direction as Birdlip. Ms.-Know-It-All here had to show Tom that this was indeed an alternate exit from Birdlip, one that possibly didn't involve hills of death. I reached for my GPS ... and swatted air. Where was my GPS?

If we hadn't gone down the hill of death, if we hadn't come across the alternate path, I wouldn't have discovered that I had dropped the GPS about 30 feet back when I took off my rain jacket. Thank you, hill of death.

It was mostly cool, slightly muddy forest trails today. The sun peeked in and out, but there were lots of clouds. The rain, as befits the land of Camelot, only comes at night. Quite a lot of the forest smelled of wild onions or garlic. I had just eaten breakfast but it still made me hungry.

We have seen only two wild critters on our walk so far. Yesterday we saw a tiny bunny hop through a hedge. Today we saw a deer. No squirrels, very few birds. Instead we've seen tons of dogs. We rarely see one human and one dog. Usually the humans are outnumbered by their dogs. We saw one tiny woman with five dogs. "Holly" wasn't especially obedient, although she was friendly, so she got yelled at a lot.

The ups and downs are rated with one, two, or three arrows in the guide we are following. There aren't any three-arrow ascents on The Cotswold Way, thank goodness. We had enough of that on the Coast-to-Coast walk. The two-arrowed pieces are hard enough, though. The "dreaded two-arrows," Tom calls them. Up until now, the two-arrows have been mercifully short in length. Today that ended. We had a rough combination of one- and two-arrow ascents, one after the other, and they were long.

One of the toughest climbs was to the top of the hill from which they roll the big wheels of cheese that stupid people chase down the hill. It's at least a 70% grade. The pictures below don't do the hill justice.

We met a nice older man when we hit the golf course close to Painswick. Yes, another golf course. Usually The Way is well posted, but we couldn't believe the trail led onto a golf course and there wasn't a signpost. One of the golfers noticed our hesitation and told us to keep going through the course. Gotta love the sense of humor of whoever designed The Way or whoever designed the golf course.

Anyway, the aforementioned older gentlemen walked onto the course at about the same time we started across. He took a different path into the neighboring woods. Tom and I debated whether to take that path, but decided the GPS and our golfing buddy couldn't be wrong.

About half way through the golf course, we came across a quarry. (This unusual golf course had holes around the quarry and down the side of that hill. I think if you were playing 18 holes there, you'd really get some exercise!) There was the elderly gentleman in front of us. The trail led past the quarry and back into the woods. We followed the sprightly guy for quite a while before we caught up with him. You're almost to Painswick, he said.

Although we passed him, we found ourselves at an unsigned juncture a little ways on. There was our friend again, and he gently guided us to the right way. I'm not sure why we didn't just walk with him. He certainly was fast enough, and he certainly knew the way. Nevertheless, we beat him into Painswick by a few yards. We promptly got lost in Painswick, but our mysterious guide was nowhere to be seen.

We got to Painswick, our rest stop for an extra day, early. Despite the ups and downs, the walk was only about eight miles. We headed for the nearest cozy tea shop and had a late lunch, followed by an early tea. You have to take advantage of all the additional eating times the British have!