A guidebook to the Cotswold Way describes it this way:
“The Cotswold Way measures 102 miles on its journey from
Chipping Campden to Bath, and it’s a devious route – a switchback, stuttering,
to-ing and fro-ing, climbing and falling walk. One moment you’re wandering
along the scarp edge, with toy-sized farms and villages scattered across the
plains far below, the next you’re heading down to them – to explore a magical
village, or a small market town with age in its streets, whose cottages are
faintly warm and luminous, as if they knew the trick of keeping the lost
sunlight of centuries glimmering about them. To walk south along the Cotswold
way is to make a pilgrimage with Bath, its Regency splendor and the glory of
its abbey, beckoning from afar.”
In
those few sentences lie the reason we’re walking the Cotswold Way this year. That
is, we want to see if we can find people that actually talk like this.
But seriously, folks, isn’t that a beautiful description?
Just think, if England can produce writing like this for trail guides, imagine what
they could do with books, plays, and such.
Like our walks in Ireland, this walk will be from village to
village, with overnight stays in Inns and B&B’s. Our luggage is driven ahead to that night’s
B&B, and we walk with only daypacks.
It sounds like daytime temperatures will be in the low 70’s, and we’ll
have to deal with rain from time to time.
Our itinerary for the walk looks like this:
Day 1 (Tuesday, June 5): Chipping Campden to Winchcombe: 17
miles. This is a lot of miles for one day, so we’re going to try to do a 6 mile leg of it the day before, after we get into Chipping Campden.
Day 2: Winchcombe to
Cheltenham: 16 miles
Day 3: Cheltenham to Painswick: 14 miles
Day 4: Painswick to Uley/Dursley: 13 miles
Day 5: Uley/Dursley to Wotton under Edge: 10 miles
Day 6: Wotton under Edge to Hawkesbury: 8 miles
Day 7: Hawkesbury to Cold Ashton: 13 miles
Day 8: Cold Ashton to Bath: 10 miles
You gotta love the names of the villages in the Cotswolds.
That will probably be the topic of a blog along the way.
There is a scientific component to this walk. That component has to do with warm beer. The hypothesis we’ve developed for this part
of the walk is that it is possible to learn to like warm beer, but that it
requires consistent, repeated exposure to fine English ales over a period of
several days to do so. Followers of this
blog should expect to read about these efforts at consistent, repeated exposure
to English Ales. Be assured that these efforts won’t be your
basic pub crawls, but will, in fact, be done in the name of science.
I know many of you are asking the question: “Are Marty and Alan ‘s wives involved in any
of this?” And you aren’t the first to ask this question. Pat and Donna brought
up the subject early on. So, after Marty and I finish the Cotswold Way, we’re
returning to London to meet them. After
a couple of days in London, Marty and Donna will off to Paris and Amsterdam. Pat opted for Italy, so she and I are headed
for Milan, Venice, Bologna, Florence and Bellagio. We’re anticipating that the scientific portion
of the trips with wives will rely less on warm beer and more on great wine and rich food.
I’ll try to keep the blog updated regularly, but I know from
previous experience I might miss a day, due to things like limited internet
access, or excessive experimentation with warm beer. But I’ll make it up when I
can.
A few comments about ... comments:
Please comment. We
love to hear comments from everyone when
we’re on these walks. In blogs of earlier walks, some folks have had
problems getting past the Blogger/Google registration process, probably because
Google is trying to glean marketing information from current and previous
generations of your entire family while you register.
So, I’m going to try leaving the comments settings on this
blog open to everyone, but require you to go through the word
verification process to leave a comment. That should at least eliminate the automated
spammers.
Hope that works for everybody. (If it doesn’t, how will I know?)
