*I’ll note right away that the schedule for today called for walking 16 miles from Drewsteignton to Morchard Bishop. Because there wasn’t an accommodation available at Morchard Bishop (I suspect because innkeepers and B&B owners are less eager to take a single traveler when they could get more money for two people sharing a room), the company that booked this trip for me had arranged for me to be picked up by a taxi in Morchard Bishop and driven to the Devonshire Dumpling, an inn with rooms in Morchard Road (not so much a town as a cluster of houses, this inn, an auto garage and a train station). But I realized in looking at the maps that I was passing within five or six hundred yards of the Devonshire Dumpling before walking the last three miles to Morchard Bishop. The taxi would be taking me back three miles. When I started out, I thought ‘sure, why not do it all,’ so I called the taxi company and left a message confirming the pickup at 5pm. (No one answering the phone at a cab company? Probably a very small operation.) But as the day progressed, the idea of turning 16 miles into 13 miles was too appealing, so I cut up the road to the Devonshire Dumpling at Morchard Road, called the cab company to cancel the evening taxi (but I am keeping the morning cab ride to Morchard Bishop, so as not to add three miles to tomorrow’s walk), and felt no regrets whatsoever. I am not a trail completist. I can live without walking those three miles.

The day started early (7:45, because I thought I was going 16 miles), with a long stretch downhill on country lanes that reminded me that I have knees.

And then, well, let me be honest and say that the day is a blur. I have reached that point in walking at which my mind is empty and the miles pass. Certainly there are moments of surprise and pleasure and grumbling, but without consulting the guide pages and my photos, it is honestly hard to reconstruct the day. I have taken in so much landscape, and thought so much about the state of my life, and sung the same song repertoire so much, that the brain just went on a meditative retreat, letting my body get me to the next place.

There was the rise up a long hill to the increasing noise of traffic, to quickly cross a bridge over the A30.

There were sheep.

There were flowers.

There were an incredible number of waymarkers, sometimes even in the middle of a field where the way was fairly obvious, as if the people who mark trails were overcompensating for the twenty or thirty miles of high moor with, you know, about 10 markers.

There was a railroad crossing.

There was a lovely old estate house.

There was a windmill.

There was a massive-scale farm, which I could smell for half a mile, with that sickly sweet manure/fermenting smell that big farms have, where men were using industrial bulldozers to load what I assume was fertilizer from the huge piles of hay and cow shit that had been cooking long enough to make it useful and odoriferous.

There was mud. So much mud.

There was a cute little church, if it’s fair to call a church cute.

And there was a moment, 13 miles in, when I decided not to walk those last three miles, and spent a blissful afternoon napping.

 

Some days, you don’t think much, you see a lot but don’t remember much, and you are perfectly content. It was that kind of day.