Back to the learning experience. I had never tried to do any internet work with the iPad. It turns out you can't just post a picture from the iPad's collection of photos to the blog; you have to do a firemen's brigade of passing the picture from app to app to app, until finally you can grab it for the blog page. Not that I'm whining. Okay, maybe I'm whining. There is a stupid satisfaction in making it work.
Now, let's talk about the Cotswolds Way. The other day we met two women from Boston at breakfast. They had gone for a day walk and gotten lost. Obviously they had made it out okay, but they walked an extra couple of miles. Ha, ha, ha, I said wisely, that always makes a good story to tell friends and family. Yes, the 70-ish mother said with a shake of her head, her 40-ish daughter had already emailed and posted their haplessness to everyone.
So here's our good story.
We were lost for 20 minutes on our walk today. That's doing pretty well for us. In Portland we once tried to hike to OHSU and wound up walking to the coast. We were lost for an hour. (But we didn't see any bears or cougars.)
For the most part, the Cotswolds Way has been very well posted, but this area is the confluence of many, many trails, footpaths, ways, and gravel paths. And anyway, it's all Rick Steeves' fault.
Rick Steeves talked about The Broadway Tower (picture below). He did not recommend climbing to the top and was a little dismissive of it. Of course that meant that I had to look at it. I was so excited when I saw it, I charged through the gate, not noticing the marker point for the Cotswolds Walk that pointed to the right, just outside the gate I was charging through! So Tom and I wandered around the grounds of The Tower, taking this wrong footpath and that wronger footpath. I finally looked at the GPS (which is fairly useless on its own, but is handy in conjunction with the guide book) and it showed the path turning down far from where we presently were.
Back on the right path, we bumped into a woman who had missed her turning and was about to miss her bus. She had almost walked all the way to Stanton, our goal for the night, before realizing she was on the wrong path. Huh. It's always a game of one-upsmanship with walkers.
I whapped my knee on a stone wall. The bruise made it difficult to go downhill. My new hiking boots that I thought I had broken in adequately began to pinch my right foot. Then a bee stung me. Tom's fine. It's all about me, me, me.
Several pieces of chocolate, a hot bath, and a rumination about how it was nice and sunny today, how I got to see a panorama that should have been shrouded in fog made me feel much better.
About the weather. When we were walking on a grassy swathe (that had nothing to recommend it other than it was grassy and a swathe) at the beginning of the hike, a man walking his dogs paused to give us the weather report. Oh, yes, he said, it was supposed to be thunderstorms today. The rain was supposed to be torrential. Well, good day, he said, and went off to play with his dogs.
Indeed. Good day.
The Cotswolds Way isn't all glamour and nature.
Six horses came galloping when we showed up. They were disappointed in what they saw. Here's one of them crying on another's shoulder.
The infamous Tower.
What grows wild here that we struggle to cultivate in our Portland gardens. Bee balm, honeysuckle, cranesbill geranium, poppies, and a small butterfly that is black underneath and crimson on top.
Boy, a few more bites of that lunch or a dessert at dinner, and we wouldn't have been able to pass through this gate!
Ice cream lady setting up for the summer crowd in the town of Broadway. Strangely enough, their main street was broad.
At the start of the day, Tom and I tried to take a selfie. No dice.
Tomorrow a picture of my new best friend, Monique, from Chipping Campden.
