Another Long Walk: Day 18: Taking It Easy....

August 13, 2024: I decided to sleep in especially late today, mostly because I had an extraordinarily short day of hiking planned--less than 5 miles in total! Karolina was scheduled to fly out early in the morning in just four days, and I figured the easiest and quickest place for her to exit the trail was along Hadrian's Wall, which was less than 20 miles away. Which meant I needed to do some shorter days!

The midges in the morning were absolutely horrendous as well, and the idea of going outside my tent wasn't especially appealing.

However, rain was in the forecast in the afternoon, so ideally I'd do all of my hiking before the rain hit.

I eventually got up and moving. The terrain was mostly rolling hills. I was worried about it being especially boggy since that's what the guidebook warned about, and while there were definitely boggy areas, it was nowhere near as bad as I feared. A few days earlier going over Cross Fell it was certainly much worse.

There's not much to report about the day's hike, in any case. A short day of rolling hills with some occasional boggy areas.

Knowing I had such a short day of hiking and wanting a little comfort out of the afternoon rains, I had booked a B&B that was about a half-mile off trail. Since I had less than 5 miles to hike today, it wasn't a huge burden to hike a half-mile off trail.

I arrived at the B&B at about 1:00pm, a full two hours before check-in time. I figured even if the room wasn't ready, perhaps I could still sit inside somewhere and out of any potential rain, but Leslie had no problem with checking me in early.

The B&B seemed like it was located in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farms and otherwise empty countryside, but my guidebook said that it was possible to have pizza delivered so a town must not have been particularly far away. And I really liked that idea rather than depending on the food in my pack. Pizza sounded much better! I also ordered some garlic bread and sodas to be delivered, which arrived about an hour later. It was delicious! A nice treat in the middle of nowhere. Had my guidebook not mentioned the possibility of getting food delivered, it would have never even occurred to me that that was an option.

I ordered pizza to be delivered for dinner. Tonight, we'd feast like kings!

It did start raining in the afternoon, but that was no longer a concern for me. For the rest of the evening, I watched Netflix and did some work on my laptop, but basically I just relaxed and rested, a sort of strange mini-vacation from the trail.

Karolina spent the evening planning out her exit from the trail. She had figured out where she would get off the trail at, and knew she was planning to fly out from Edinburgh very early on the morning of the 17th, which meant she had to make sure she was in Edinburgh by the 16th--but she hadn't made any plans about where she was going to spend the night or what she would do in town. So for her, she spent a great deal of time figuring out those sorts of details and making a reservation for a hostel in the city.

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