I wrote much of what is below yesterday afternoon. It is Thursday morning, June 26th, and it has been raining since about 1 a.m. It was still light at 10:30 last night, and I took out my iPhone and made the first and second images in the group I have linked to below.

We head home tomorrow, and I am ready to resume my "normal" life. So many things come to mind that I am unsure what to do first. I will start by taking a deep breath. Anyway, back to yesterday's entry:

We are in Edinburgh, Scotland. We arrived yesterday late afternoon. We took a bus from Robin Hood's Bay to Scarborough (yes, the Scarborough in the Simon & Garfunkel cover of an old English ballad), then a train to York and finally a train to Edinburgh. The train arrived about an hour later than scheduled due to a problem with the overhead wires. Some of you may remember that on our first day in the UK, the train we were supposed to take from Edinburgh to Carlisle had a problem with the overhead wires. Fortunately, we do not have any more train travel planned.

Robin Hood's Bay, North Yorkshire

Yesterday morning, right after breakfast, we packed up and left behind the foul-smelling room at the Arncliffe Arms. Sticking to our plan, we walked to the village of Egton and caught the train to Whitby. The train was packed with vacationers and day visitors looking to escape the heat inland and have a nice day at the coast. The train ride was just over 9 miles, but you could feel the temperature moderate as we approached the North Sea.

Yesterday was the penultimate day on this Coast to Coast walk. Well, it was supposed to be. Last night, we decided to end our walk. We are sunburned, sore and exhausted, and we have nothing to prove to anyone. Today's walk would have been almost 20 miles with 2400 feet of climbing, which is way beyond what we would want to do or could do. Instead, we will walk about three miles to catch a train and then a bus to Robin Hood Bay, the designated end for the Coast to Coast walk. We have a hotel booked there for two nights. We are looking forward to some rest and maybe even a swim in the North Sea.

Yesterday was a continuation of walking through a region with little to offer in the way of scenery—flat and featureless with large fields of grain (wheat, barley and rape). It was mostly cloudy in the morning, but the sun peaked through the clouds later in the day.

It was just a 9.1-mile day, so it should have been an active rest day, but we arrived in the village where our lodgings were just after 1 p.m., and check-in was not until 4 p.m. Over a leisurely lunch, Therese's research on the area identified another abbey ruin. There were many abbeys in England, and Henry VIII had his minions wreck them all and steal their treasure.

Yesterday, June 19th, the 16th day of our Coast to Coast walk, was challenging. It may have been the third or fourth most challenging day so far. It was almost 13 miles, had five significant climbs, and had an extremely short one to finish (I have included an elevation profile in the images). In addition to the challenging terrain, almost the entire day was shadeless and warm, 74° F, which is very warm for England. Every part of my arms, neck and face I missed with sunscreen is burnt crisp. The top of my right ear is severely sunburned

There was a 1969 movie titled "If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium." Well, today is Tuesday, and we must be in Danby Wiske. It was a long 12.5-mile slog through Big Ag (agriculture), bright sun and temperatures in the high 70s. Great weather for England unless you are walking in a flat, featureless area with no shade. It was a tough day. There were compensations and the end of the day. We arrived in Danby Wiske at 3:00 pm to find the pub did not open until 4, but the local campground had a little shed store (honor system) with all sorts of goodies. We each had a little cup of ice cream; Therese had strawberry, and I had orange sorbet—it was great!

First, some housekeeping—I apologize for the inconsistency of my numbering system for the days of the hike. Second, a friend let me know that the link for the photos in the Day 10 entry was not working—fixed. Those photos were among my favorites, so if you have the time, check them out. Finally, for those of you who are commenting, I cannot approve your comments with the mobile version of Squarespace, but I am seeing them

We are in Richmond, a market town with an approximate population of 9000. Today is our first and only rest day, and we needed one. Last night, we had Thai food for dinner, a wonderful break from the pub food we have had in each of the villages over the past ten days. Yup, ten days and 128 miles done, and just six and 77 miles to go. This morning, six days and 77 miles seems beyond my endurance.

I suspect this will be a two-part (two-day) entry. While the internet/wireless is quite good, the packing and organization this morning will take longer than usual; more on that later. We usually have breakfast after we finish packing up, but breakfast is early this morning, and we will need to finish packing up after breakfast.

I forgot to mention yesterday that we have been very fortunate with the weather. We have only had two short and gentle rains while walking. We walked under a completely clear sky and blazing sun two days ago. Even with using SPF-50 sunscreen, I have slightly sunburned arms.

I am struggling a bit to write and post a journal entry every day. There are three reasons: fatigue, time and poor internet availability. The lack of or poor internet availability is the prime reason. If there is wireless in the hotel/pub where we are staying, the router lacks the power to cover the whole building, or the time it takes to upload even the smallest image file size makes which makes it impractical to upload a post. I suspect that even the broadband service for these communities has slow upload speeds. You can see that because almost no one is looking at their phone, like in more urban areas here and everywhere at home.

We get up every morning to the same routine. In some ways, I feel like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day. Over the past two days, we have had some relief from not walking due to my knee issues.

Yesterday morning, we caught a taxi ride to Shap. The highlight of the ride was a drive-by look at Lowther Castle. It had that fairy tale look and beautiful gardens.

Rest Day

We arranged for a taxi to take us to Patterdale, the destination of the walk we skipped. Patterdale is close to one of the lakes, Ullswater, in the Lake District Nationa Park. We were at leisure most of the day, so we rode on one of the ferries that take passengers to various stops along the shore. It was an hour's ride from one end of the lake ("water") and back. It was Sunday, so there were canoes, inflatables, motorboats, sailboarders and sailboats out on the water. A regatta was going on, and the wind was up, so the sailboats often had their spinnakers up - they were flying

It would be nearly impossible for a day of walking to be more strenuous, challenging and exhausting than yesterday, but today came very close. A large part of that was the hangover (physically and mentally, not from the consumption of alcoholic beverages!) from yesterday.

Today, we picked up the segment we started yesterday during our walk around St. Bees Head. We walked for a little over three hours and are at the entryway to the Lake District National Park in a small village - Ennerdale Bridge.

The day was supposed to include the climb over Dent Hill, regarded as one of the more difficult parts of the Coast to Coast trail - oh darn! Trees were across the path, so we were diverted to the lower trail. On the way, we passed a stone circle, a megalith, the Blakely Raise Strone Circle. I have included a photograph in today's images, that really does not do it justice. It is no Stonehinge, but you cannot help to wonder by who this was built and why. Like many of these sites, this one has suffered over time (we visited several in Spain and Portugal).

After a leisurely breakfast, we headed off to walk the St. Bees Head portion of the first day's hike—just about 6 1/2 miles. It was a fantastic walk along the cliffs with views of the Irish Sea. In the mist, we could make out the mountains of the Isle of Man. It was windy and cool most of the day, with periods of sunshine. The wind was strong enough to cause some unsteadiness, which was of concern as we walked very close to the cliff's edge.

We are here in St. Bees tired but happy that our travels are over. It was not the worst travel day (just over 24 hours) I have ever had, not even close in fact, but it was not without its challenges. We made all the connections until we arrived in Edinburgh and found out that the trains to Carlisle were all cancelled. The overhead power lines had come down somewhere along the line and they told us it would be at least late afternoon before the trains were running again. That would have meant we would miss the train to St. Bees from Carlisle, so we went to plan B - we took a bus. It was a long three and a half hour bus ride, it was a local and stopped it seemed every other mile! The length was offset by the beauty of the area.

It is a beautiful day by the bay, of course, it had to be! We are headed England to do the Coast to Coast walk, from the Irish Sea the North Sea. It will be in the low 50s in Fahrenheit, windy and raining when we get to St. Bees, the starting point for the walk. But to get to St. Bees we have quite a number of connections to make:

One of the challenges of keeping a public diary or journal is the sense of obligation and responsibility it creates. You invite readers to read your diary, and readers reasonably expect regular updates. I set that expectation myself with my Cape Cod daily diary and fell short—disappointing myself and surely some of my readers—mea culpa. My only consolation is that I sent notifications to a select group rather than all subscribers.

After writing and posting entries for Day 1 and Day 2, I started to write an entry for the penultimate day, and this is that start, written before, events, complications, and time pulled my attention elsewhere (I haven’t written a single word for Day 4, yet) —