After three days in London, you might think I’d have grown fat and lazy and unprepared for the walk from Winchester to Eastbourne, 100 miles of rolling downs. In fact, Tracy’s fitbit informs us that we were walking about twelve miles a day in London. Not everyone’s idea of how to spend a vacation in London, but we had a blast. Friday we saw a wonderful exhibition of art by Mary Heilmann, whose work I didn’t know but liked a lot, then heard an amazing free lunchtime piano concert at St-Martin-in-the-Fields and then dashed back to our hotel, grabbed our bags and took the underground to the train station, catching an earlier train than we’d originally planned on taking with just minutes to spare. Our good fortune held, and the train was in fact going to Winchester, as we had assumed. My good luck and optimism as an approach to travel continues to work.

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Winchester is a lovely little city, with the amazing cathedral as a centerpiece. We sat for a bit of evensong and heard the cathedral’s remarkable choir, had a very nice dinner and made and early evening of it, the sort in which I pretend to read as my eyelids droop.

Our B&B hostess was very pleasant, but also just a tiny bit tart, thrown perhaps by my strange American disinclination to eat full English breakfast (I was talked into eggs and bacon, though I wish in retrospect I’d gone with yogurt and cereal instead…that’s all I really need in the morning). We met a lovely mother and daughter, Dorothy and Sarah, walking the South Downs in bits and pieces. So, for instance, they’re taking this weekend to do two days. It sounds tempting in a way, but I know myself and I think I know Tracy enough to say that we both prefer the sense of completion that comes from going all the way from start to finish. (And of course it would be, let’s say, a bit impractical to fly over to England for a weekend of walking every month or so.)

And so we set off, making our way out of Winchester and it’s surrounding community (I wouldn’t call it suburbs exactly, but Winchester is spread out). As always, the hardest navigation on the trail is getting out of or into bigger towns, with elaborately detailed instructions to go down this street, then go left, then go right, then left. We got all of that right, and set out across fields where we could see how much the downs will be the place where the word undulating comes in handy. This is rolling country, with some steep bits of walking, but mostly increases and decreases in elevation that are more gentle. You know you’re going up, but you don’t quite register that you’ve gained 300 feet of elevation in half a mile until you look back from the top and see what you’ve done.

We did do our first bit of getting lost, crossing a road and continuing up a pleasant but more overgrown path when we should have turned on the road. The placement of the sign for the way was slightly ambiguous, and we just read it wrong. We got to the top of the hill, read the landscape, read the directions, read the landscape, debated whether that turning path could go toward a church, debated for a minute or two and concluded that we had to retrace our steps. It was perhaps a quarter mile each way, so not a disaster. And in a way, it was good to get our getting lost out of the way, because it made us attentive, perhaps a bit over-cautious even, in reading the directions even when the signage was absolutely unambiguous. The countryside is thrilling, with new prospects coming into view at every turn of the path. I’d show you how thrilling, but Tracy and I talked a fair bit, and even when we weren’t, I got distracted from my usual prolific photo-taking by the shift to walking with someone after ten days of walking utterly alone (and as you know if you’ve read the Stratford to London entries, I wasn’t just walking alone, I was alone on the trail for vast portions of that hike). Usually on the Shakespeare’s Way I was taking 50-60 photos a day. Today I took 14, and Tracy took perhaps a dozen.

And of course walking with someone is an adjustment. Tracy and I walk together well, partly because we are careful to check in: Do you want to lead for a while? I’m slow on these uphill bits, is this fast enough? Do you want to stop for water, I kind of do? We know each other’s walking habits pretty well having walked long trails together twice in the past, but we remain attentive to those small courtesies like shifting who is reading the directions, sometimes a pain with the Cicerone guide we are using, which for some reason doesn’t include maps on the page after page of trail description for the trail walking west to east. Following our custom, we tore apart the book yesterday and threw out the parts we didn’t need, including the half devoted to describing the trail east to west. Tonight we worked out that the guide does have maps, but only in that east-to-west section that is now in the garbage can of our host in Winchester… oh well. So we have to use our actual map in conjunction with the illustration-less walking directions. But we’re quickly getting better at knowing how to interpret what these directions do well and where they are lacking and we need to use the map and our trail instincts (given that first wrong turn, let’s hope our trail instincts get back in tune quickly).

The path had a few steep climbs, but nothing truly difficult, and so far no uphill grades as hard as the one hill in the Chilterns that was at something like 50 to 60 degrees of incline. There are challenges, of course, but nothing that has me counting breaths and steps yet. We saw some lovely wildflowers and reconfirmed that in the intervening years since our last walk together in England, neither of has become qualified as a botanist. “Look at that flower. It’s not foxglove, and it’s not hydrangea, and it’s not a rose bush, and it’s not dandelion. It’s pretty.” Beyond that, I have run through my flower vocabulary. I am a bit more distressed (though I don’t know why it causes me any more distress) that other than wheat and corn, my knowledge of crops is woefully lacking. We may take some more boring (to most of you) photos of crops to do research later and figure out what we’ve been walking through.

We did encounter some weekend warrior type bicyclists. I’ve noticed that cyclists on the trails, at least the ones I’ve encountered in Shakespeare’s Way and the ones Tracy and I have encountered today, aren’t great about calling out in advance when coming up from behind. I’m so used to hearing a shouted “on your left” when the rider is still yards behind me that I had a genuine startle when a cyclist practically ran over Tracy and me, only calling out something like “coming up” when he was right behind us. I’ll just remind you that my taxi driver last week described weekend cyclicsts as “road vermin.” I wouldn’t go that far, but they definitely subscribe to a different code of trail etiquette than walkers, who are friendly even if all they say is “Hiya.”

The end of the day was a lovely descent from a very high hill that went down somewhat quickly, then into a field where it dropped very quickly and where we walked within ten feet of a herd of cows who just couldn’t be bothered to leave the shade of the trees near the gate in the fence through which we had to go. The path then took a more gently descent into Exton. We are technically staying in Meonstoke, just across the river. But given that Exton has one pub/restaurant, and the only business we’ve seen in Meonstoke is our hotel/restaurant/pub, I’d say Exton and Meonstoke are as chummy as two villages can get.

We arrived around 2pm, and spent the afternoon reading (me) and walking around to see Meonstoke’s lovely church, which like so many buildings we have seen is built with a lot of flint in the stone-masonry, which looks exotic and beautiful to my eye, though I am sure anyone from Hampshire, who sees these almost shell-like concave faces of the stone in the walls of many buildings, would find utterly mundane. Such are the pleasures of walking, slowing down enough to notice the beauty of the stones in the stone-masonry.

We had a simple dinner (both ordered hamburgers, which were perhaps made more delicious by our well-earned hunger) and we’re now winding down, listening to the occasional car go by and a dog barking every so often somewhere nearby. Tomorrow has some good hills, and, if the guide can be trusted, some amazing views. Given that today’s views seemed pretty darn amazing to me and the guide didn’t remark on them, I am hoping for something dazzling.

Miles walked: 12 trail miles, but add a mile from our B&B to the trail start and a half mile for our slight detour. So, 13.5 miles approx. A good day.