The plan was simple: I would begin my walk along Shakespeare’s Way by stopping at Will’s birthplace. It seemed like a fitting way to kick off the journey, marking a beginning with a memorial to a beginning. And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those pesky tourists… and my disinclination to get clipped an entry fee to learn about a poet and playwright whose works I’ve taught and whose plays I spent most of college appearing in.

The day began pleasantly, if a bit later than I would normally like (B&B hosts often don’t get walkers, and on weekends they start breakfast service later—in this case at 9am) with cheesy scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. My B&B host instructed me that I could catch the first water taxi (10am) down to Stratford either by hailing it from their dock or, to guarantee a seat on the first boat, walking up the river about 500 yards. So off I went up-river to join a queue. Which there was. I was fifth in line out of ten people, and the sign firmly proclaimed that the taxi only seats seven. Phew. Then three water taxis came into view, like a line of ducks in the river. Still, I did get a seat on the very first boat, even if it only saved about a minute, since taxi two came right along behind.

The taxi captain was a cheerful old fellow, happy to give a bit of history and opinion (“Coming up is a house I think is an abortion that should be torn down. Looks like a prison or a post office.”) He was also invested enough in giving us our money’s worth (two pounds for the ride) to shut off the engine as we approached a certain tree in hopes of not disturbing the kingfisher that sometimes perched there. Alas, no bird, but a nice try.

Once we docked, I headed toward the center of town, where even on a Sunday morning, the hordes were out to walk a rather more circumscribed pilgrimage than mine, theirs encompassing the Shakespeare Center and Place of Birth, Shakespeare’s grave, the RSC’s impressive Swan Theatre, and approximately 700 shops selling every kind of Bardiana you could want.

There was pretty big crowd at the Shakespeare Center, which always chills my enthusiasm for any activity, and there is an entrance fee, which put the final nail in the coffin of my intention. I paid respects to the street performers doing their part to commemorate the Bard by putting on facepaint, pretending to be statues and posing with tourists. Will, whose work was aimed not just at groaning English majors but theatergoers at every economic and taste level (cf. all the dirty puns) would be proud.

With somewhat comical resentment for all these damn tourists, I got me hence, passed the Swan and the church where Shakespeare is buried, and made my way out of the city. After all, I came here to tramp across the countryside, not to breath the fumes of buses (excuse me, coaches) full of weary tourists trying to recall which play other than Romeo and Juliet they’ve actually read.

It’s hard to explain the giddiness with which I faced the first trail marker I had noticed for the Shakespeare’s Way, but let’s just say I giggled and grinned.

And off I went through fields, often right through the middle of a field of wheat or corn or whatever the heck that is in the photo. (Botanists: identify that crop!) British right-of-way laws are a glorious thing. If there is an established trail across your land, you can’t block it, and any fence or wall has to have a gate through it or a stile to climb over it. And people just walk on through.

The day was warm, bordering even on hot, and sunny absolutely all day. It seems my gift for bringing good weather to the trails I hike continues (famous last words…).

And so I walked, establishing my rhythm, feeling the delicious effort on the hills, thrilling at the undulating hills and dales. (It’s a shame poor dales are always second banana, rarely getting mentioned without their older brother hills.)

Undulating—Yes, one of the problems with trying to describe the countryside is that the words have all been used before. If I try to describe the bucolic calm, the earthy smells of farming, the lush greens of the plantlife, it all starts to sound like a travel guide.

And speaking of travel guides, I quickly learned I would be relying heavily on the guide to the Shakespeare way, with it’s painstaking descriptions (“Walk up the hill through two sets of twinned oak trees, then continue to follow the path to a shaggy fence…”) It turns out that, unlike other trails I have walked in England and Wales, the Shakespeare Way is marked with almost willful perversity. When you get to a kissing gate (see photo) where there’s no question you are on the right track and that through it into the next field is the only way to go, there will be a way marker. But the trail markers evaporate from the landscape for the tricky bits, leaving you in the hands of the loquacious guide writers, whose language is detailed if prosaic. (“Walk sixty paces down the road and turn right into a small unmarked path through a hedge.”). A few times, even their language failed, and I added perhaps a half mile to my day in missed-trail detours. (My sister and frequent walking companion Tracy will be impressed to hear that I did not lapse into a string of foul language, just shrugged. Must be the good spirits from my first day on the trail.)

The trail hits everything you’d want (well, I don’t know about you, but I’ll assume that if you’re reading this you might at least want by proxy) in an English country walk. Tiny towns with a big church hundreds of years old that must have drawn every family from the surrounding countryside for most of their existence. Funny little bits of path through wooded glades that feel like they might be the gateway into a magic garden. Cows and sheep (Oh god, my old friends sheep, who haunt my every walk and give me their deadpan stare when I stop to take a photo. If they got angry and developed opposable thumbs, the population of the United Kingdom would be doomed.

It was a long day, and as exhaustion crept in, the number of photos lessened, the giggles faded out, and I was left only with the quiet and my intermittent snatches of song. I’ll confess here that when walking alone, I get a song stuck in my head and sing for a while until it fades away, then lapse into silence for a while (sometimes half an hour, sometimes several hours) before a new song takes its place. I’ll also confess that I know far fewer of the words of “Brown-Eyed Girl” than one might have thought likely. “Hey where did we go? Tuesdays and so slow. Something something something hey hey. Something in the misty morning something something and YOU MY [pause] BROWN EYED GIRL. Do you remember when we used to sing? Sha la la la la la la la la la la di da.” Ouch. Sorry, Van Morrison.

The first day of a long walk is hard, or at least has been for me. All the preparatory walks in the city or in local forest preserves are helpful, but the vast flatness of Chicago doesn’t get me ready for all that damn undulating. So I ended my day quite, quite, utterly exhausted. My B&B is perfectly nice, and the bed is comfortable, but it’s a bit of a letdown after Purple Haze. (Another song to which I know only snippets of the words.)

I had a rather tasty pad thai and a pint of cider for dinner (Shipston-on-Stour boasts a surprisingly good Thai restaurant attached to a pub very much of the local where everybody knows each other variety. The six people at the bar while I ate all knew each other, and chatted about how drunk everyone in town got the night before (there was some kind of local festival yesterday) and then switched to politics, but only at the most cheerful and non-confrontational level: Who would be the next prime minister, wondered one fellow. This led to jokes about the candidates, none of whom seem to be held in much regard. But it lacked the strange air of nastiness and bewilderment and anger that comes in American conversations about our own upcoming elections. These people had lived through the Brexit vote, in a part of the country where the majority voted to stay in the EU, and now they could only laugh at the jockeying for position among the politicians.

It’s early morning now, since I was too tired to write last night. There are doves, I think, cooing outside the window, it’s light out at 5am, and in a few hours, I’ll be on the trail again. My leg muscles say “Huh?” but my heart says yes.