Regular followers of the blog might reasonably wonder if my adventure in Italy had taken the ramble out of Hank. Though it was stunningly beautiful, the food incredible and the company, my sister Karen, a wonderful walking companion, was a hot hard haul. Would that be the end of my rambles? That was 2023, so my silence in 2024 might have led to that conclusion. (I’m just vain enough to think that perhaps some of you actually took time out to think about my walks…).

To be honest, I took a pause in 2024 partly to catch my breath and partly to save a bit of money. And in fact it turned out to be fortuitous; 2024 threw a lot at my family, and I had time off from work to use. My brother Rob, recovering from surgery in December 2023 to remove a schwannoma from his right ear, suffered a series of strokes, and was in the ICU essentially paralyzed on his left side and mostly unable to speak for months.

The family rallied to help, traveling to Austin in shifts to help my sister-in-law. I was able to arrange my work schedule to work remotely for half days for a few weeks in February. So I went to Austin and spent the mornings with Rob in the ICU. His mind was mostly unaffected, but he could only communicate with one finger pointing at an alphabet on a sheet of paper, or in hard-to-understand whispered speech. We read several books together. I returned later in the spring for another week.

The doctors were trying to figure out the cause, while Rob continued to have strokes (the final total was over ten). Finally, after several months of the doctors arguing over likely cause and shifting medications to match the theory that was winning at any given moment, they finally found markers that revealed the cause was an incredibly rare fungal infection. That set them on a path of treatment, using an array of anti-fungal drugs. And remarkably, Rob started to get better. As you might imagine, the whole thing was scary, and though Rob has made progress that is nothing short of miraculous (read about it on robsartin.com), it was all terrifying.

So, it was a year when I needed my time off and had a lot going on.

But in 2025, I turned 60, and I decided that called for a big trip. I started looking at options. And as is my wont, I decided it would be good to walk part of the time with other people. My sisters were both eager, and we looked at an array of options. We settled on the Lake District, and we found a nice four day walk around Lake Windermere that isn’t incredibly demanding, but has some good elevation gains to keep it from being too easy. And for myself, I found a nice long walk on Lady Anne’s Way (ladyannesway.co.uk) which runs for 100 miles through the Yorkshire Dales and into Cumbria. I am doing it in a leisurely 10 days with a rest day in the middle. I promise to share some biographical details about Lady Anne Clifford, a 17th Century noblewoman most famous for her protracted legal case involving her inheritance, but also notable for her part in preserving some really remarkable castles and estates.

And because I love the Yorkshire Dales and still had a few days, I am also walking a two-day trail. So: four days walking, travel day to get to the next trail, two days, walking, another travel day, five days walking, a rest day, five days walking. And it’s all a return to the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales, which were on the route of the first really big walking trip I ever did, the Coast to Coast trail, (That hike was before the birth of ramblinghank, and one of these days I will transcribe my notes from the little notebook I kept, but don’t hold your breath. It’s been fifteen years and I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

So, join my for three weeks of rambling in the rolling hills of northern England.