Day 9: An Uneventful Day on the Trail

August 4, 2024: It rained during the night, but the rain had largely stopped by morning and we got a relatively early start to the day's hike by leaving camp at about 8:00am. Good job finally waking up earlier, Karolina!

Because it looked like it might rain at any moment, Karolina wore her bright red rain poncho the whole day, but it turned out not to really be needed. While there were some very light sprinkles occasionally, it was never so bad that I felt inclined to pull out my umbrella.

Due to the ugly-looking weather, Karolina wore her giant red poncho--although it turned out to be largely unneeded.

The day's hike was quite uneventful, which is nice to experience, but leaves little to actually write about. The weather was cool and cloudy all day.

I did finally hear back from Martin saying that he was back home and doing better, so I was glad to hear that he was still among the living. I will note, however, about a month and a half later, he emailed me an update about being diagnosed with some sort of blood cancer and the pains he'd been having since February were likely a result of the cancer the entire time--it was just not diagnosed until recently. At the time of writing this, he's undergoing chemo and probably not feeling too great, but hopefully he'll beat it and stick around for many more years to come.

Not knowing about the cancer yet, however, we felt relieved that Martin was doing better. I had been concerned after not hearing back from him for a couple of days!

By the end of the day, I didn't particularly feel like camping. The weather forecast called for rain, and we had been camping every night since starting this trail, with the one exception of the summerhouse which was more like glamping than a real hotel. So I looked around online and splurged for a hotel in the town of Hawes. 

Hawes was hopping with visitors! Where did all these people come from?!

 
It was nice not having to set up camp and know we'd be high and dry from any rain during the night. For dinner, we headed across the street to the Wensleydale Pantry where we ordered jacket potatoes. For dessert, I might have also ordered a raspberry cheesecake--and washed it all down with a pint of Coke-Cola and water. Karolina bought some sort of dessert that I failed to note in my journal and a local beer.

We both ordered jacket potatoes for dinner tonight! (But we did order different types of jacket potatoes, in case you're thinking the two meals look different.)

Looking at the weather forecast for the days ahead, I noticed that it was supposed to rain the whole day a few days from now, and tentatively planned to work a zero day around it. I felt like we were due a genuine rest day from the trail, and we may as well work it around a day when the weather was expected to suck the whole day anyhow. A lot, however, would depend on precisely where we managed to get to before the weather turned bad.

And thus ended another day on the trail.....

There was clearly an active mine on the hillside in the distance, but I'm not really sure what they were mining.

Packhorse-style bridge

I could imagine the Hogwarts Express puffing over this railroad bridge!