Day 11 – To Danby Wiske (14 miles)
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| Bye to Maureen and Jenny in Richmond -- we had a delightful stay. |
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The sun absolutely shone on us today! The scenery today and
(from what we understand) tomorrow isn’t the most spectacular on the route, but
it’s easy walking and we got a chance to see some English farms up close and personally. But we did get to leave Richmond via an abandoned railway that's been turned into a park path. This took us to a lovely woodland that was filled with cool shade and lovely little waterfalls.
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| Removing the moleskin -- my British pedicure is still intact! |
It was a perfect walking day and not a single body part hurt
once I took the moleskin off my right pinky toe. Turns out you can cause more
discomfort with padding than without it!
It never ceases to amaze me that we can walk directly
through peoples’ farmyards and pastures. Today we actually walked through
someone’s dressage arena, and the horses just watched us from the field beside
it.
There’s also a lot of cropland now with a lot of hay,
potatoes and barley. Another thing we noticed about the dairy cows here is that
they’re beautiful. The Holsteins look like their black spots are made out of
velvet.
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| Lovely farmland |
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| The Coast to Coast sign points right to a private farm field. |
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| British farmland |
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| More pastoral beauty in the Yorkshire Dales |
We made the trip into Danby Wiske, one of the tiniest
villages on our route. When we arrived the weather was astounding—the sky was
cloudless blue, the wind was warm and there was a village green square just
outside our inn, The White Swan, where we sat for two full hours—Jan with his
favorite Diet Coke and me with my brand new favorite hard cider. It was pure
decadence to sit in the sunshine, watch hikers come in from the road and write
postcards in leisure. We felt truly blessed to be on such an amazing trip.
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| Danby Wiske was a favorite! Danby means "Place of the Danes; Wiske is the tiny river that flows through the area. |
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| Decadence! Sunshine, time and a hard cider! |
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| Here I am in the foreground with our inn The White Swan behind me. |
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| The town green at Danby Wiske |
The night was crowned with a huge, wonderful surprise, when
we entered the restaurant that evening to find our friends Joy and Andy sitting
at a table. We shared squeals and hugs –
like we were meeting best old buddies. During dinner, the Euro Cup Football
(Soccer) game started – England vs. Ukraine.
Andy, Jan and I watched the whole match with the rest of the full pub.
It was quite an experience to watch England win with a crowd of cheering Brits.
And Andy was very patient, explaining all the details to me. He kept
apologizing for it being a boring game, but I thought it was fabulous.
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| Jan at the White Swan with the football game starting behind him. |
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| We have absolutely NO idea what this was about -- but British foothball fans are definitely nutty! |
Day 11 has gone down in the books as one of our very
favorites!
Gorgeous pictures! Parts of England look a lot like the farming country up around Fergus Falls, MN where I spent summers as a kid. Looks like you're having some fun. :)
ReplyDeleteEllen, Nancy and I have penciled in July 22 for our next CP meeting, at 10:30 a.m.
Meanwhile, I've been thinking ahead to our writers' retreat in August and propose bringing a crock pot and each of us bringing the ingredients for a favorite crock pot recipe, and fixings for sandwiches and wraps. If we each cook one meal during the retreat, we can still go out to eat a few times, if we feel like getting out of there, but it won't be using up as much time, energy and money as if we were doing it every day.
We could even be slightly organized so as to not each bring a lot of the same stuff. i.e.: One jar of pickles should do it. :)