I’m looking back on a day of fourteen miles of forward progress, but doing it from the same hotel room I stayed in last night. As I noted yesterday, because there was no accommodation available at the next break in my walk, a car service was arranged to take me back to the hotel from which I started, and in the morning he’ll return me again to the point where I left off. It pleases the completist in me, that wants to have walked every foot of the way, but it does highlight that for all the ‘rugged man striding across the land’ delusions I can muster, this is a luxury vacation. At the end, I won’t have the perfectly cleansed skin and pedicured toes and enhanced yoga practice of some luxury vacations. (God knows my toes, rough and with calloused bottoms, would send manicurists screaming) The tan I’ll have won’t be from the consistent all-over tan of a beach vacation. (Despite using sunscreen, I’ve got a hiker’s tan: arms below the short sleeve line and legs from just above the knee to the sock line above my ankles) But it’s an indulgence. I’m not walking because I have to get somewhere. And I’m not roughing it, lugging a tent and finding a field to camp in.

Perhaps I’m just feeling guilty because I had paté on toast and pumpkin risotto for dinner. If I was going to stop at one hotel for two nights, this place is a good choice.

I mentioned watching a hawk yesterday, and today it bloomed into an obsession. Perhaps it’s a regional thing, but suddenly I’m seeing hawks all over the place, hovering above the fields looking for something to snack on. Birds in flight are really hard to photograph with my camera—a digital camera with reasonable but not high end zoom, which means I have to zoom in and try to track the bird in flight using the screen view, then snap a photo, which frustratingly has a slight delay in zoom mode, meaning the bird can go out of frame between my pressing the button and the photo being taken.

At the end of today’s walk (I’ll get there, I swear, but out of order today, in keeping with the forward and back motion of the walk), I sat in the outdoor area of a pub watching situated on the high edge of a steep hill in the dramatic Chilterns (a designated area of natural beauty). They worked the air currents from the up-draft, gliding forward into the wind to go out over the valley, then adjusting their wings slightly to let the wind push them back toward the high ground, then adjust again to carry the air currents to the left or right a bit, and then forward again. It’s hypnotic to watch while sipping a pint of cider and waiting for the car to arrive.

I was thinking about hawks and how they map the world, and how differently the brain must be wired if you are in flight so much of the time. While we use maps to flatten out the land we walk across—or drive across, if you’re lazy—our original experience of the land is very much three-dimensional. We think of the land as the thing we cross. But a bird maps her world from above land features, and one of the more crucial aspects would be how the air moves around them.

How do they map the landscape? They map in three dimensions in some sense, but it must be quite different from our own way of creating mental maps. In flight, the land and altitude and ever-changing wind currents relate to each other in a wholly different way. A dramatic hill isn’t a thing to be conquered, on which to set a fort or a church. A hill is an updraft generator and, depending on whether it is stony or grassy, a worse or better place to find prey. I’m not trying to anthropomorphize birds; I’m thinking about how our own brains are shaped by the way we experience the world. If our species had evolved with wings, how differently we would think!

The trail today was a pleasant mix of farmland and woods, with one long stretch through a small but spread-out town (about a mile walking on the sidewalk of the High Street, which had all of five shops in one cluster and was mostly houses and the local school and a few churches). There was a lot of walking on paths shared with bridleways. I haven’t mentioned it but that has been the case on and of all the way. Today it was far more of the time.

And I finally encountered a rider, the woman in the photo, who was doing a bit of trail maintenance, breaking branches in this very overgrown part of the trail where her horse and she could barely get through. I got close enough behind, since she was going slow, to say hello and to help clear a big branch she had broken off the trail, which got me a thank you before she forged ahead. I don’t know what the walking speed of a horse in overgrown woodland is, but it’s notably faster than the walking pace of a middle-aged journalist.

Today I also saw more people on the trail, actual walkers with walking poles and packs. Partly this is because the path joins for a stretch the very popular Ridgeway trail. Inspired in part by Rachel’s curiosity about people, I stopped and chatted with two hikers. They were two men in their late fifties I’d guess, from London. They were on a circular weekend walk on the Ridgeway, something they do every few months. One of them, a short man with wild grey hair down to his shoulders and a beard, all of which made him look like an eccentric scientist (it somehow wasn’t hippie hair, but I can’t explain the difference), was more chatty than the other. He was curious about the new-ish Shakespeare’s Way, and whether it was well-marked and how often I’d gotten lost. It turns out he must be some sort of academic, because the mention of Chicago got him to reveal that he’d spent time living in Iowa City at the University. We talked for just a few minutes, about the things hikers talk about (navigation, gear, the weather, the weather, the weather), and I was off again.

It was a study in the social customs of trail encounters, on which I will now expound. Trail meetings have their own complicated set of cues and customs. Not everyone wants to stop and chat, so you have to signal that you are willing to chat without seeming like a) some pest who will disrupt a good walk, or b) a serial killer. Whether the parties are coming in opposite directions of the same directions, I’ve noticed in my hikes that one trick for giving the initial “I’d chat” signal is to stop with some pretense. You pause shortly before you will pass the opposite-direction hikers, or shortly before the hiker coming up from behind is going to pass at a quicker pace, and fuss with a strap, or get a drink of water, or look at some feature in the landscape. Trail markers and intersections are another good place to stop for conversation without seeming creepy.

Once Party 1 has stopped to sip water, Party 2 has been offered an opening, but has options. Walk by without acknowledgement (rude), pass with a ‘hello’ and a nod (acceptable) or stop and make a conversational opening gambit. Mine with these two walkers who I was overtaking was “Are you walking the Ridgeway?” And we were off and running, knowing all parties welcomed conversation.

But in general, it was a day of solitude and almost not thinking. I’ve reached that part of the trip in which my mind has let go some of the idea loops on repeat that tend to cycle through my head in my normal life (Am I ready for a job change? I have so much email to sort through for the column. What do I have in the refrigerator that could plausibly be called dinner? Etc.). I can reflect on things like trail sociology and hawk mapping, but it feels less frantic.

Today, I should note, marked the return of more serious hills, this time the chalk Chilterns. One of the little secret thrills of my conversation with those two Londoners was that when we talked about the trail ahead toward London, one of them said something like “Well, this next bit is just climbing up the escarpment, and then you’ve got twenty miles of beech forest…” Escarpment! Yea, that meant the horrors of getting into a steep-sided valley and knowing the trail would turn up for one of those count-your-steps ascents. (see photo, which doesn’t convey just how god-awful steep that next 350 steps were)

All in all, it was a lovely day, which ended with a car ride and conversation with the driver, who apparently does a lot of work moving bags and people for Contours, my walking company. Though I hadn’t really thought out the details before, they must have a network of local car services like his that they employ to move luggage and people. We talked a bit about Trump, whom he was curious to hear if I thought could go all the way (No), and Brexit and the politicians in the U.K, who are all, he feels, just going mad right now, not knowing what to do or who has any power or authority to lead. He scrupulously avoided talking about Brexit itself (no talk about the impact on the country or about immigrants or self-rule), confining himself to what the politicians have been up to since the vote, jockeying for position. I opted not to press him. I was happy to just to watch the country go by as we made our way down country lanes, moving back toward a shower and a bed.

Total distance walked: 14 miles. Total distance gained in terms of where I am spending the night: 0 miles. But of course the car will take me back to my end point in the morning, so it’s all going to work out.

Postscript: Confirming my brother-in-law’s informed notes on tie rod washers, here’s an S-shaped version. But clearly old buildings used wood, as the second photo shows.