to something in the 15 to 19 range.
Over a few days we make our way to St Bees, the start of the Coast to Coast walk. Three hundred kilometres from the Irish Sea, across three national parks, to the North Sea. It is now mid August. We will be walking a little after the peak of summer, but the school summer holidays start in mid-July in England, and we hope that by starting a month later we can avoid the peak season crowds.
As preparation we've walked the Lycian Way; 500km up and down mountains in Turkey. Our instinct is that the Lycian Way should be plenty of preparation for the Coast to Coast, but we completely under-estimated the Lycian Way and are determined to not make the same mistake twice; so we are trying to avoid making too many assumptions with regard to our levels of fitness for the Coast to Coast. The Coast to Coast typically takes between 14 and 19 days of walking. Or goal is to enjoy the walk as much as possible, rather than complete it as quickly as possible. To this end we plan on starting out slow, and then seeing how much scope there is to speed up. Fiona's back is a bit twingy, but this is the only injury that we are starting with.
We've got basically the same gear that we used in Turkey, except that I've replaced my boots after the Lycian Way destroyed the previous pair, and we've swapped the lightweight raingear that we had in Turkey for some much sturdier coats.
An important difference between the Lycian Way and the Coast to Coast is that on the former we had to carry all of our gear on our backs (31kg between us on a bad day), but for the Coast to Coast we are utilising the services of a company that picks up our gear in the morning and drops it at our next destination in the afternoon. This means that we are only carrying 10kg between us during the day. The only downside of utilising the services of the pack carrying company is that it does largely preclude the option of wild/freedom camping (which we so enjoyed on the Lycian Way).
We've got to St Bees without any great drama. The biggest thing that went wrong was that we were relying on a bus to get us from Whitehaven to St Bees, as described in the Coast to Coast guide book, but when we got to Whitehaven we discovered that the bus service had been decommissioned; so we caught a taxi.
We've researched which mobile phone networks have the best coverage on the Coast to Coast route, and purchased a British SIM card for each of our phones. We've opted for two different networks to maximise the chance that one of us will have coverage.
Anyway, we are now in St Bees and ready to start the Coast to Coast tomorrow. In high season people are advised to book all of their Coast to Coast accommodation in advance. We feel that this would constrain the timing of our walk too much, so we have only booked the first 4 days in advance. It will be interesting to see how booking accomodation on the go works out.
Final preparations - carbo loading with cheese cake and sticky date pudding - the desserts of champions.
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