The thing about taking a walking trip away from home, as opposed to just taking long weekend rambles from home, is that first you have to get to the starting point. I left home in the mid-afternoon Friday to get to the airport. It’s now early evening Saturday and I have just arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon. That involved huge amounts of waiting interspersed with brief bursts of energy to board some kind of transportation (el train, airplane, bus) and a lot of sitting among a bunch of strangers all engaged in the disorienting experience of travel.

But I like to think of these long complicated ‘getting theres’ (gettings there?) as a transitional phase. Home is the familiar, the places and sounds and smells I know. The walking trip is it’s own enclosed little world, one in which I walk and let my mind wander and let the day-to-day go on without me while I relearn the feel of the pack harness and the funny little squeaks of my boots and the smell of nature outside a big city. And between home and the walking world is the getting there, being in transit. Rather than get frustrated with the long waits and the general confusion of trying to remember how signage and language works in England (sometimes slightly different from American signs—the odd ‘way out’ instead of an ‘exit’—sometimes more confusing (Do I want a pharmacy or a chemist if I want to buy band-aids?)), I prefer to think of it all as an invitation for a weird mix of observation and meditation.

Observations:

• The coach driver from London to Stratford who offered every passenger on his coach a Werther’s candy, saying “It’s my birthday, and I’m 75 today, but I give out the candy every day I drive because I want my passengers to get something sweet.” And he made it sound just a little like a joke, defusing the potential gooey sentiment.
• The couple on the coach (bus is in a city, coach runs between them—there’s one of those language things) chatting away in a foreign language (I wouldn’t even venture a guess which one) but then when the phone rang, the woman answered “hello?”, paused to hear the reply, then lapsed back into her own language. Why the English greeting? No idea.
• The feel of the land rising and opening as we get out of London. In the English Midlands, the country is open and rolling, and it feels strangely as though you were high up, in part because the rolling country seems to be dropping away on all sides from the high ground from which you observe, even in a moving motor coach. But I know from experience that this same land, which I will re-cross in the other direction, retracing my path back to London, will change feeling often when viewed from the walker’s perspective. Sometimes I’ll be walking in a little valley and feel deep below the world, and sometimes I’ll be on a high prospect looking out over the country unfolding ahead of me. And I’ll feel like every gentle undulation, every rugged bit that seems more dramatic and genuinely hilly, speaks to me with an invitation: “Keep going,” it says. “See what’s over there.”

And that’s what I’ll be doing starting tomorrow. First up, sixteen miles from Stratford-upon-Avon to Shipston-on-Stour (Oh the place names! More on that later, I am sure…) But that will be when I am rested and ready, and not hauling my extra suitcase (which will be transported to my next stop every day by luggage van in probably under an hour for the distance it will take me five or six hours, or more, to cover). Today, I did a little bit of walking just to stretch at the end of the trip (and to save a taxi fare for a ridiculously short distance from the center of town to my B&B). The mile and a half from the Stratford coach drop-off to my bed and breakfast doesn’t sound like much, unless you have to walk it with a daypack and a heavy bag full of all the changes of clothes and electrical cables and books to read and the astonishing number of ordnance survey maps I will be using to navigate the trek to London. Add in the general fatigue from having been in transit for, let’s say, close to 24 hours, and a mile and a half takes on substance.

So now I am settled into my room, which, in keeping with the playful color theme running through the house, is in shades of purple and is called the Purple Haze room. (Savannah Green, Ocean Breeze Blue, Mocca Heaven, Amber Sunrise). Given my foggy, travel-clouded state of mind, I think I got the right room.