If one had to pick a section of the Southwest Coast Path to restart a walk with a still-delicate ankle, this might be the section: It began with a long fairly flat or gently rising and falling four miles or so. We are now headed basically east, though little coves and big protrusions such as Lizard Point mean we shift direction from east to north a bit, the east again as we get to the head of a cove, to south to go out to a point, etc.

Walking with one other person is quite different than walking alone or with a group. Alone, you commune with your thoughts and set your own pace, but it can be lonely. With a group, there is a lot of chatter and getting everyone moving and stopped is a logistical challenge. But with one other person, there’s plenty of time to talk about serious stuff in life, but also a lot of time to make simple observations, such as “There’s long grass on the south coast; we haven’t seen tall grass like this before,” or “There are a lot of snails, and they love the path.”

It isn’t exactly the wisdom of the ages. It’s the mind just quietly humming along noticing things and, because humans are social creatures, sharing the bits that seem at all noteworthy. So far on our trip, we’ve wondered about the tricks of English dog-training that make for such obedient dogs, whether the fuscia blooms on one plant with two colors of flower turn to purple or do they start purple and go to fuscia, whether the ferns that grow near stinging nettles developed some sort of ‘anti-toxin’ to the stinging (since one remedy proposed for stinging nettle sting is to rub the underside of a nearby fern on the stinging area), what kind of geological action formed these varied rocks. It’s nice to let the mind just reach out and be curious, even if we have no access at that moment to the answers. (Googling on most of the path would be impossible due to cell reception, but also strikes me as missing the point.)

The day was cool and pleasant for walking, though the particular degree of overcast makes a lot of the photos look oddly grim and dark. It was in fact very nice walking weather, not too hot, not too glaringly bright, breezy enough without seeming like weather moving in.

And it was a varied day of unusual sights.

We passed a golf course.

We passed by this nursing home, which used to be a hotel, and which we both agreed looks like the setting of either a Stephen King novel or a torrid romance novel (“She came to the countryside to care for the elderly and escape a bad romance. A local man with roguish charm swept her off her feet, but would a secret from his past shatter both their lives?”)

We passed the marker for the spot where Marconi sent the first transatlantic message.

We plunged into a remote cove down perilous rocky path, so steep we kept wondering if we’d missed a path leading further inland to avoid the descent, all the while hearing some animal’s cry (a seal? a gull with a very weird call?) from the cove that sounded like something or someone in distress. (We determined it wasn’t human, but on the way down, our own fear of slipping and falling, a bit exaggerated for obvious reasons, made any sound seem like danger.)

As the day wore on, my strategies for not getting a twinge of pain in the ankle meant that I was using a whole different set of muscles, and muscles down the outside of my left leg got more tired than usual as I placed my foot just so over and over. But we kept up a pretty good pace.

The Lizard is a peninsula sticking out into the sea, and much of it is in a nature preserve, though in Britain that doesn’t mean there are no private owners. We passed cattle grazing in the nature preserve. And as we got closer to the southernmost point on the mainland, we saw more people. The path here is a tricky mix of areas where so many people have roamed the cliffs that there is no one path, just an area through which you thread to the next place where there is only one option and one path, usually a place where the path plummets down to a cove. With people out for day walks, we sometimes got into little traffic jams of people going up a flight of steps (sixty or seventy steep ones, carved in the hillside) or down a winding set of switchbacks.

I passed my exhaustion point, with all the extra energy expended to treat my ankle right, around mile 12 and then sort of pushed through for the last few miles, with my feet just the usual soreness from a long day of walking. Karen was clearly getting very tired too around mile 13, and we were both annoyed to find how long the walk was from the place we left the path to head to our B&B.

Making up for this, we have the most charming B&B hostess, who made us a pot of tea with buttered scones and chatted about her family and local life and gave us advice on where to eat and noted that the forecast isn’t good for tomorrow and offered to drive us partway if we wanted a shorter day tomorrow.

We had dinner in a very reasonably priced and busy local place that, honestly, was like a Howard Johnson’s, with a gift shop and a big menu and lots of fried food options and ice cream desserts. We both got the Mariner’s, a nice basket of battered fried seafood, and walked in a sudden unexpected bit of rain back to the B&B to collapse into bed at, no joke, around 7:30. I read for a while, but this day tired me out, so I may have to re-read everything I scanned before dropping off to sleep.

The forecast calls for rain all day. We have 15.5 miles to walk. We have an offer to be driven part of the way to shorten the day. Decisions, decisions.