If someone had told me I'd be walking in a T-shirt in the sunshine in England in mid-April I'd have said they we're nuts. If they had said it would be sunny for days on end, I'd have asked for the name of the institution they had recently escaped. But that's just what we got...after our snow day, that is. Sunshine. Glorious sunburn sunshine. Even so, we all awoke to our last day of walking from Tormarton to Bath with a sense of trepidation. It was rumoured to be the hardest, longest day with several steep ascents at the end and our slightly aching aging bodies were saying, "Really? Again?"
Our historical stop for the day was the field where the Battle of Lansdown was fought in 1643 and where the earliest surviving war memorial in Britain stands to mark the place where a dude named Sir Beville Grenville was killed.
By day's end we all agreed it was the easiest day by far. Except for maybe the slow slog through the outskirts of Bath to the centre of town and the Abbey, the official end of the Cotswold Way. After days of near solitude on wooded trails and grassy hillsides, traffic and congestion suck.
One hundred miles conquered...well, 102 officially. And even though the Camino was five times that distance, this was a far tougher grind. The terrain covered was more difficult, the miles slower to tick off. So the end came with a total feeling of accomplishment.
We celebrated with a pint...okay, a couple of pints...and the best curry I've ever had at a restaurant called Rajpoot.
Just in case you ever find yourself in Bath and have a hankering for Indian food.
Beer du Jour - Cobra...brewed to eat with Indian food. But Raven's Gold...yet another new fav.
No comments:
Post a Comment