Well, this is an exciting day.  I came home from Chicago to find that my application for a new AVA club had gone through.  It’s official!  The club is called FOOTSORE FIENDS and will be mostly focused on local area hikes.  We will be doing regular Saturday walks and possibly a mid-week 5K walk as well. 

I will be doing some clean-up/reorg on the blog to enable it to be the club’s blog and also will be starting a separate website to post the club’s walking schedule and ‘09 YREs.  Hurrah for new beginnings.

Ah, mid summer!  You can pretty much count on warm weather and family weddings.  This past weekend I was in Naperville, Ill attending my nephew’s wedding.  And what a wonderful, raucous affair it was!  I managed to get in a few walks while there — the Chicago/Oak Park walk, which is terrific.  This is one great thing about volkswalking. Under no other circumstances would I have thought to go check out Oak Park.  The walk included a dozen or so homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, his own home and studio, and the birthplace of Hemingway.  It was in the mid 90’s, but the neighborhood was full of large shade trees so it was bearable.  Great walk and I highly recommend it.  On Friday I couldn’t talk anyone into going downtown for the walk I had planned.  There was too much going on.  But several of my relatives and I walked at the local Morton Arboretum, which was a nice experience as well.

I know the Four Plus club had their big NW Hiking Weekend at Crystal Mountain last weekend.  If anyone cares to post a report, I’d love to hear about it.

Anyone want to share their walks this week?  What’s up in the Northwest?

We did a lovely walk today.  It was an AVA event put on by the Laguna Turf ‘N Surf Walkers.  It was in Huntington Beach at the Bolsa Chica Ecological Preserve.  I love nature walks and this was a terrific one with lots of soft dirt trails, a zillion birds and nice water views.  The Preserve isn’t super large, but the club did a nice job planning the route and the 10K covered pretty much the entire preserve.  The weather was cooperative as well — 75 degrees with an ocean breeze.  Terrific!

CLICK HERE to see all the Bolsa Chica pictures.

I was looking for a hike I felt safe doing alone on Saturday and settled on Bernardo Mountain in my guidebooks.  It’s in nearby Escondido and sounded like a very popular trail (including with runners and mountain bikers).  I checked weather.com and it predicted a high of 85 in Escondido so I planned to be at the trailhead by 8am.  I would be in and out before it got bad.

Ha!  Man, I am still a newbie when it comes to walking in California in July!  It was already 84 on my car temperature readout when I reached the trailhead.  I gamely started out.  The beginning of the trail is ugly — a construction zone.  They are building a new bike/pedestrian bridge at Lake Hodges that will enable bikers/walkers to get easily between Rancho Bernardo and Escondido.  It will be great when done, but for now it’s a sight.  There is also an orange-fence-and-sign detour of the lakeside trail due to fire damage.  Despite this, the walk is very pretty.  You are quickly at the edge of Lake Hodges and you follow it on a soft, level dirt path for over a mile.  It’s a beautiful place with sea green water and reddish earth.  There’s a great 5K lake walk in the making here!

To get to Bernardo Mountain you turn right up a trail.  The initial climb has an easy grade and is very pleasant.  The entire ascent is about 2.1 miles and does get steeper.  It also gets hotter!   The afforementioned fire is evident in the blackened skeleton of trees along the route.  There is zero shade the entire way except where the switchbacks allow you to take a bit of cover in the lee of a hill.  At the top there’s a water tank and some impressive views.

I was feeling annoyingly lame because I had to stop for rest several times.  And the march back to the car felt uncomfortably long and hot.  When I got back to my vehicle at about 10:45 the temperature readout said 93!   Lesson learned: 1) don’t trust weather.com; 2) the ‘heat of the day’ comes very early and 3) in July stay coastal!  This is one that will bear repeating in, say, February.

CLICK HERE for Bernardo Mountain photos

It’s the return of weekly rants and raves!  What have you been up to this summer?  Done any good walks lately?  Talk about ‘em here.

I was looking forward to having some extra walking hours during the holiday weekend.  I got to check out two new trails.  The first was in Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego.  This place is huge — it will take a whole lot of visits to see all the hiking loops here.  On this day I was with my husband and it was 85 degrees so we chose a 3 mile loop around Oak Canyon and Grasslands.  We also walked down to the lake by the campgrounds.  Unfortunately, I forgot my camera.  On Saturday I did a 7 mile hike at Bernardo Mountain.  I’ll post about that in a separate entry.

I didn’t blog after this last day on the trail.  From the moment we got to Kirkby Stephen we were on the run.  We caught a taxi to the train station and then the train to the nearby town of Skipton, then another taxi to our hotel.  The next day it was rush rush again to catch the train to London and get ready to leave for home.  I guess it was a good thing not to have too much time to think about the fact that it was over.

But I can certainly recall what the last day was like.  Like day 6, it was not a hard day.  The landscape continued to be fairly level — farmland, moors.  This is not to say it was ever “easy”.  Even on a 12 mile day like this, the footing is rough, there are plenty of “mini hills” and the way feels long when you’re crossing terrain without a lot of variation.  And, of course, my hamstring and other assorted bits and pieces were aching.  But none of that matters when it’s “the last day”.  You just try to savor every moment of it.

The best part of our last day’s walk was that we spent a lot of the day walking with the people we’d met on the trail.  This seemed very fitting.  We weren’t the only ones who’d be ‘peeling off’ in Kirkby Stephen.  Two couples from Australia were taking a rest day there while others were not.  So it was unlikely they’d ever run into each other again, either.  Another gentleman had gone further than the rest of us the day before and was already far ahead.  So it was kind of like the last day of camp. 

I have to say, one thing I did not anticipate was how much the other walkers would add to our experience.  When you’re travelling over rural terrain and staying in very small villages, usually without TV or internet, passing the time with company takes on a whole new flavor.  And everyone is curious to learn where the others are from, what made them decide to do this crazy thing and how they were enjoying it.  It seems like most of the people on the trail were American, Austrailian, English and Canadian.  And although everyone found it challenging, we didn’t meet anyone who wasn’t happy to be there.

Looking back on our grand adventure, I can see things I could have planned better (like the first day’s difficulty) and things I wish I could have done (like walk the 2 days I missed and finish the rest of the Coast to Coast).  But I wouldn’t have given up any of the things we did.  I wouldn’t have missed seeing the splendid Cornish coast on foot on the SW Coast Path or finally getting to see the Coast to Coast for myself.  And I am glad we went in May.  After the first two days we had fantastic weather and got to experience a country full of wildflowers.  It wasn’t easy, but it was wonderful.

The only question is, where to next year? 

CLICK HERE for the day 7 photo gallery.

We had a grand day today.  The weather continues to be perfect – high white cottonball clouds in a deep blue sky and a nice breeze to keep things cool.  But best of all I was able to get back on the trail today.  Hallelujah!  You have no idea how happy I was.  You don’t think about how great it is that you simply can do the day’s walk until you can’t.  I had a back-up plan of stopping at Shap if my hamstring got bad, but with a little help from the medicine cabinet I managed to do the entire day’s mileage.  I feel really fortunate.

Today’s walk was easy compared to what has come before.  You read about the Coast to Coast and logically you know that it starts in the Lake District and then moves into the Dales, but the actual physical transformation is startling in person.  There was a definite shift from mountainous terrain to nearly flat terrain yesterday.  Today’s walk was level for the most part.  We walked across fields and along streams and through several farms and villages.  A large part of the walk went through some moors.  They were just how I imagined moors to be  – flat and grassy and almost springy in texture with lots of large limestone rocks sticking up here and there.  There were various ancient monuments lying about such as part of an old Roman road, a stone circle and “Robin Hood’s Grave”, which we never did actually spot (but it was on the map).  The final downhill into the village of Orton was just gorgeous with a warm afternoon sun and picturesque fields, stone walls, a stream and lots of wildflowers.

We are really enjoying the company of the other walkers who are on the trail with us.  Whenever we cross paths everyone fills each other in on their thoughts of the day and gradually flesh out the details of where they are from and why they are here.  Today everyone was so curious and encouraging about how I was doing, how my leg was, etc.  I think every walker can relate to that stricken feeling of getting an injury, and they’ve all been as supportive as you can imagine.  And I don’t even know these people!  That’s the camaraderie of the trail.

We only have one day left on the Coast to Coast.  Tomorrow we walk from Orton to Kirkby Stephen and then we are done.  We fly home in just a couple of days.  I miss my husband and dogs like crazy so I will be really happy to get home.  But I am already mourning leaving the trail.  You can get incredibly spoiled with days on end of nothing but scenic walking following by eating a wonderful meal and having a pint at the pub with friends and then hitting the sack.  Repeat infinitely.  Not to mention the fantastic scenery in rural England.  And the people have been so nice at every stop.  They treat you like royalty.  What a life!

CLICK HERE to see my day 6 gallery.

When you’re on a walking vacation and doing long distances every day over challenging terrain you can’t help but think about how easy it would be to step wrong and sprain an ankle.  And on the long, steep downhills, when the knees are complaining, you can’t help but imagine how awful it would be if a knee went out entirely.  Blisters and sore muscles are par for the course, and they can be walked through.  But you just hope that nothing serious occurs that would keep you off the trail.

Unfortunately, sometimes it does.  I got up on day 4 with a terrible pain in the bottom of my right hamstring.  It felt like I’d torn some ligaments down where my hamstring attaches to the back of my knee.  Extending my leg fully was excruciating and I could only hobble around like a pathetic gip.  No way was I going to be able to walk that day.

To make a long story short – and an unglamorous one it is – I missed two days on the trail.  Marcia skipped the first day with me and on the second day walked with people we’d met on the trail so she was able to do the last day in the Lake District.

Let me tell you, there is nothing more boring and frustrating than being on a walking trip and watching all the other walkers take off in the morning.  You sit in these tiny villages and wait for the baggage transfer van to come and port you to the next stop.  There’s nothing to do but read and listen to vacuum cleaners run.  It’s deadly dull.  But worse, you know you are missing a day’s walk that you can never get again, not unless you come back and repeat the trail.  Anguish.  Truly.

All the other walkers have been so generous and sympathetic.  I guess they are glad it didn’t happen to them!  One of the Canadians is a nurse and she loaned me a cold pack and gave me instructions on how to doctor myself.  She’s ordered Ibuprofen every four hours. 

The first day I had a horrible feeling that my vacation was over.  It felt like I would in no way be able to walk the trail for the remaining 4 days.  But the second day I was better.  I ate Ibuprofen and kept my leg up and prayed.

We were anticipating quite a break today because we only had to walk 9 miles.  The traditional Wainwright day was 16 miles from Rosthwaite to Shap.  But it was a grueling day and more recently it’s been popular to stop in Grasmere and/or grab a bus the short distance from Grasmere to Ambleside to spend the night.  And so our tour package was booked.  Good! 

We were still in Lord of the Ringish scenery.  So gorgeous.  After the very pleasant short bit at the start that was level and along the river, we started to climb.  The guidebooks called the first ascent up Greenup Edge “a reasonable grade”, though long.  It was certainly long!

After the climb up Greenup Edge there was a second, steep ascent up Lining Craig.  This was more scramble than walk, but it was short.  (And I preferred it to the long ‘gentle’ climb that proceeded.)  It reminded me of the scramble up Steamboat Rock in Central Washington.

When we reached the top of Lining Craig we were done with the toughest climbing of the day.  We took a water break, chatted with our fellow walkers and watched the straggling line of walkers still sweating their way up.  Something extremely satisfying about that.  After a bit we all took off across the top of the mountain to find the correct way down.  There were lots of dirt paths across the marshy top, but the C2C path was marked by cairns.  Fortunately, we had excellent visibility so we had no problem.

We descended into one bowl-like green valley, but it was just a precursor.  After a mile or so we climbed out again and then began our real descent.  There was an alternate “high route” but we chose the “low route”, descending through the valley.  It was a gorgeous place but the paths were rocky and the descent long — about 3 or 4 miles.  So we were glad to finally see farms!  From there it was a short way into Grasmere.  We were tired.  9 miles of this terrain had been a very full day.

Grasmere is on the C2C path but our B&B was not, so our tour company had given us a taxi number to call for the transfer.  We were taken a few miles to the Queens Hotel in Ambleside.  Ambleside is a decent sized town with bookstores, shops and restaurants.  All that plus a pint and a bath.  Luxury!

 CLICK HERE to see the complete gallery of day 3 pictures.