And so the final day of Stratford to London. Sixteen miles, all on the Thames path. I’ll just note a few things and let photos do the talking.
First, 16 miles on pavement is so much harder on your feet than 16 miles on grassy dirt paths. That seems like an obvious thing, but it’s worth noting it. I got tired much earlier in the walk, and though I was going a bit faster than I have on parts of the trail where I needed to navigate gates and styles and stop to read directions, it wasn’t the speed that got me; it was the hard pavement.
The Thames path is a treasure, in the same way that Chicago’s lakefront path is. In fact, this was the day for which my walks in Chicago had been training me. It goes through parkland for long stretches, but also passes boathouses and stretches of waterfront streets and a few of those mini-city developments that have eight or ten buildings and include shops and restaurants so you can cocoon in Massive Wharf Plaza when you get home from your job.
As a side note, I’ve seen a lot of crew teams rowing in training since joining the Thames a few days ago, and most of them have been women. I’m not sure if that is because of timing (are men on a break, or off at rowing events?) or because there’s some sort of new fad among British women for rowing crew, but whatever the case, I saw a lot of women rowing on the river.
And for the first ten or so miles, it was pretty quiet. There were some joggers and dog walkers, but not as many as I expected in the outer reaches of London’s suburbs. Of course, things came to a dramatic crescendo of crowds in the last three miles or so, and from the London Eye to the Globe was a seething mass of humanity, a mix of people trying to get from point A to point B in a hurry and the masses of tourists, trying to stop and gawk as unpredictably as possible.
The walk was also shaped by an observation made by my B&B host, confirming what I’d seen in the weather forecast. “Get where you’re going before noon, because it’s going to be hard rain then.” That’s not a helpful thing to say at 8:30am to a walker with sixteen miles in front of him, but oh well. So I walked today mindful that there was rain ahead, which may have been one reason I was walking a bit faster.
And it did rain, with a weather front blasting through in the way that creates gusts coming from any old direction, and in which you get ten minutes of heavy rain followed by five minutes of sun followed by twenty minutes of steady but gentler rain. And somehow, through it all, my feet once again wet in my boots, I felt tired but good. And I maintained a superstitious faith that the rain would stop before I got to the Globe. And on that front, a little superstition turns out to beat dire forecasts of rain all afternoon. Here I am, at the Globe Theatre, 146 miles of walking from Stratford. Now for a few days of city tourism, and then back out into the green country, this time the rolling path on the South Downs.
Note: Today’s title is a line from the song that closes Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a song I sang as the fool Feste in a production of that play in college. The song has the recurring line “For the rain it raineth every day,” a surprisingly melancholy place to end this play about love and mistaken identities. But the song finally ends thusly:
A great while ago the world begun
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain…
But that’s all one, our play is done
And we’ll strive to please you every day
ramblinghank 