For my next trick, I turn away from coastal walking, with its constant hovering near cliffs and dropping precipitously into little inlets, and return to more familiar rolling country walking, with more gradual ups and downs (rising in elevation a few hundred meters can be stretched out over a mile). And though the forecast called for rain showers in the morning and grey skies in the afternoon, I have learned that weather forecasts in the U.K. are for suckers—the weather is coming in from the ocean, and so it is too unpredictable to get the kind of precision we get in Chicago, where the weather comes across a giant tabletop called Iowa and Wisconsin and forecasters can be amazingly precise about the day’s weather.

So, after a pleasant breakfast, I headed the five or six hundred yards down the road (Am I mixing metric and Imperial measurements? Yes I am.) to the path to the beach. I know that for symbolic reasons I should have walked the additional few hundred yards to the beach itself, touched the water and then headed up the hill to head north, where in 120-some miles I’d touch the water again. But I’d dawdled over breakfast and it was 8:45 and at the end of the day, because my B&B is so far out of town, I had a timed taxi pick-up scheduled in Ivybridge for 5pm. Since I wasn’t sure what the walking would be like and how long it would take, I was eager to start.

The first section is a long, gradual but persistent rise from the sea. You have to understand the geology: I am heading to the moors, which are on a high area pushed above the surrounding land. The stone changes from the slate of the seaside to granite. But to get up there from sea level means a lot of uphill. I gained about 250 feet of elevation, but of course the country rolls, so I did a lot of up and down to get here.

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Despite the forecast, it was not raining, just cool and breezy with occasional gusts. And as the morning progressed, I got blue skies.

While Karen and I were walking, she noted that I wasn’t singing while I walk, something she’d remembered me talking about from blogs past. Today she would have gotten her fill, from “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (nice walking rhythm if you hit the beat hard enough) to “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” (useful for bits of uphill that look annoyingly steep, because you can focus on getting through all the verses). I was inevitably caught in full-throated warble by a man walking his dog, who came around a corner of wall and looked pretty amused when I abruptly stopped singing on seeing him. Oh well.

This was a day of the kind of walking I know well, aiming through farm fields and fields of sheep, with punctuating little sections in small woods or on country lanes. It’s not easy walking, but after the more aggressive up and down of the coast, it felt almost easy.

I passed through a stretch of path in planted fields in which, a sign informed me, young pheasants were to be found. Were they ever! Though they are hard to photograph because they run and hide the second they see you, I did catch one or two good photos. In less than a quarter mile I saw probably fifty pheasants on the path ahead, bolting off into the underbrush on the edges of the fields when they saw me coming.

As the day progressed, the sky got even clearer, with just a few little quick showers of less than five minutes as punctuation.

I don’t want the day to sound too perfect, so I must admit that I messed up my navigation twice. Once was a simple mistake to do with small enclosed fields. Often on paths, you’ll go through a series of small enclosed fields divided up with hedges, finding a gate or a stile (a sort of ladder/steps to keep animals in while allowing walkers to get through) tucked into a corner. And sometimes in these fields, there is more than one path and you have to pay close attention to which path you are on. Many paths are marked simply as a “Public Footpath,” and sometimes the Erme Plym Path, which I am taking to Ivybridge to hit the true beginning of the Two Moors Way, is not well-marked. So, if your path goes across the lefthand side of two fields, then in the third field cuts diagonally to the upper right corner to find a stone stile, it’s easy to miss that diagonal.

That’s exactly what I did, walking through five or six small unplanted fields (just grazing grass for sheep or cows), coming to a sign for a Public Footpath but not the Erme Plym, pulling out my trail notes, reading them like I was trying to decipher an ancient text, retracing my steps through six fields, looking around like an idiot for a minute, moving forward again,cutting diagonally in the correct field, and finding, punchline, that the path connects with exactly where I was when I decided to backtrack. Had I crossed that stile and gone, say, thirty feet, I’d have seen the abandoned quarry which is now a junk-car storage lot, described in my trail guide, and known I was in the right place. Call it fifteen minutes wasted, or call it an adventure. Though not a very exciting adventure.

You’d think after one trail screw-up I’d be on the watch, but somehow I made a bigger mistake around the ten mile mark, and descended down a long hill through three or four fields before, missing any good signage, I checked my guide and saw that I’d screwed up. I found myself by the side of a busy-ish road (not a highway, but fast moving for a country road, and without much space at all on the sides for a walker. But with a little map consultation, I worked out what I’d done and that I could rejoin the trail without retracing my steps, if I just walked along that road for about three quarters of a mile. Let me tell you, there is nothing quite like walking on the side of a two-lane winding road in the English countryside while cars, usually in packs of three or four, whiz past you at 30 miles an hour or more. Woof. But it got me back to the trail with less added walking than retracing my steps, and probably only added about three quarters of a mile to my day’s total.

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At this point in the afternoon, I could see that I was getting within striking distance, six miles or so, of Ivybridge. The path started alternating between fields and woods and little sections of quiet road walking (no cars or one car, versus that crazy stretch of detour, in which I saw probably 40 cars) as the area got more populated. Ivybridge is a pretty bog town (around 11,000 people), so the last bit took me past a tennis club and a school and along the riverside into town.

That last bit also took me through some fields where the gate was in the field bottom, and all the recent rain means that in one field I was plunged into mud nearly up to my ankle. Ugh. But it’s good preparation for the moor walking, where the path can often hit places that are boggy and demand a bit of cautious step-by-step figuring of where to place your foot.

And speaking of ankles, my left is almost fully back to normal. Still a bit twingy, but good for another 100 miles of walking. I made it happily into Ivybridge with nearly an hour to spare before my taxi ride, so I bought a chicken handpie for dinner: my B&B is so remote it would take a taxi to get me anywhere for dinner, and I would rather just snack on a chicken pie than deal with the hassle.

My bed and breakfast is run by a hunched-over old lady (she tells me she recently had an accident that hurt her knee, which means she hunches over to be ready to hold her knees when she needs to) and is set so far up a country lane on a hill that I could hardly believe the taxi would make it.

So, I’d call it 16 miles, mostly in cool but sunny weather, and a good start to my Two Moors walk, in which I only arrived at the edge of the moors at the end of the day. Tomorrow promises real moor-walking on the most isolated stretch of the whole trail.