On travel between trails, on accommodations, and on revisiting old haunts.

I’ve been writing this blog over a lot of walks (this is my 122nd post!), and one of the challenges is to keep it interesting. It’s all too easy to simply describe the day’s walk, a series of “and then”s that could easily be boring text punctuated by pretty pictures (alternate title of the blog…). I think some of my best writing, and most interesting, has been about other things, like trail etiquette for when you don’t say hello (near towns, mostly), when you say “Hiya” (the most common walker acknowledgement in England), and when you stop to chat. Or about packing philosophy, or bootlace tying tricks, or snippets of local history. If I do re-cover that kind of stuff, do I make it boring for those who really have followed me all the way (a.k.a. masochists)? Do they care? Are the newbies wondering “what’s in your luggage?” and “how do you pick your walks?” and ‘where does the sun go at night?”

So, for old hands, I may be repeating myself a bit. Today was a travel day, with a lot of time spent lazing around in Skipton waiting for my B&B to be ready (I’ve found proprietors variable on how they feel about early arrivals, and I have to my recollection never been sure enough to call ahead and say ‘I’m arriving two hours before you posted check-in time’), so I’ll just say a bit about accommodations.

I book almost all my trips (Switzerland and Italy excepted) through a company called Contours Holidays, which arranges all the accommodations, arranges luggage transport for one bag between stops every day, and provides trail maps (so many Ordnance Survey maps) with the walk highlighted, and usually a guidebook of the trail.

The accommodations are, of course, wildly varied. I am not staying in any five star spas with hot tubs (there have been nights when I dreamt of such a thing), partly because Contours does affordable travel and partly because such places are rare in the areas where I walk. You won’t find an in-room sauna in Outhgill, Yorkshire.

And of course I am a single walker, which means I pay extra to the company (the ‘solo traveller supplement’ tacked on each day) because Contours is paid per person, so a solo traveler eats into their margins. And B&Bs and hotels are mostly built for couples sharing rooms, so some rooms are the tiniest in the place, with a narrow single bed that takes up much of the room (hello, Old Dungeon Ghyll Inn) and a bathroom not en suite, and some are rooms with two single beds, and some are full beds, and every so often (Bali Hai) there’s a great big queen bed where the proprietor was stuck with me and their big luxurious room for couples and nowhere like a cupboard under the stairs to stow me for the night. And sometimes I end up in a room at a pub/inn that has been ‘modernized,’ which is code language for ‘made to look like a generic low-end hotel chain’ (throwing a bit of shade at you, Blue Bell Inn).

So far this trip has been pretty good. The variety is always entertaining. Cue up the slideshow:

And every once in a while there’s something delightfully weird and fun:

In many of the older buildings, the plumbing in the bathrooms is an afterthought, and in fact the bathroom itself seems to be an afterthought, often because they’ve had to do complicated spatial geometry in renovating to give rooms en suite bathrooms. So, very often there is no bathtub, just a shower stall about the size of a British phone box. And these stalls seem to be sold in kits that include all the drain plumbing above floor level, because most of these little wash-booths are elevated by four or five inches above the bathroom floor, which, combined with being wet (mostly) at the end of a shower and navigating a folding door that folds into you, can make the step down out of the shower as precarious as any rocky steps on the footpath.

And the range of options in shower controls? Every day is like having to solve the riddle of the Sphinx to get water to come out. I know that there are a lot of different configurations of faucet controls in American bathrooms, especially in the last thirty years or so of fancy plumbing design (I see you, Kohler), but we’ve got nothing on the British when it comes to variety.

I will stop there, lest I become one of those ugly Americans complaining about how nothing works like it does where I come from, and why isn’t there a McDonald’s nearby?

Let me turn instead to my day.

I had to get from Kettlewell to Skipton, where I will begin walking Lady Anne’s Way, a hundred mile trail marking the various estates and manors and castles of Lady Anne Clifford (more, much more, on her another day). And because I am between walks, I had to haul my rolling bag as well as my backpack. But I had figured out the bus schedule, and was ready at the bus stop in Kettlewell for the 9:10 bus, which rolled up at exactly 9:10. It was in fact not so much a bus as a super-extended mini-bus, with maybe 18 seats (in a one and two configuration for each row). The driver and the only two people on it when I got on clearly knew each other, and chatted happily about the driver’s holiday in far northern Scotland (“It was like being abroad!”). The trip is only 15 miles, but has lots of stops indicated if there are people waiting. Soon, a scruffy man got on at a stop located, so far as I could figure, only for one farm, and he gave the driver, who of course he knew, a gift of a plastic container of pasta from a batch he’d made (I’ve still got six portions to give away), with “Italian herbs, tomatoes, and some basil” (is basil not considered an Italian herb?).

After a few more passengers got on, we made it to Skipton at 10am.

Here’s where my sheer doggedness at walking every square inch of the United Kingdom gets weird. I’ve been in Skipton before, when I walked the Dales High Way in 2019. And I blogged about it, of course. And in my blog, I detail visiting Skipton Castle. I even mention Lady Anne Clifford and her role in restoring Skipton Castle after it had been a victim of the English Civil War in the 1650s, when royal rule was briefly overthrown for the Commonwealth. And I toss off in a parenthetical that there is even a whole walk devoted to Lady Anne, and note that it might be a good future walk. Good lord! Read this for important background and some good photos of Skipton Castle.

In fact, I am staying at the same B&B, six years later. Different room, but the bathrooms!

So, 10am, and my B&B room ready at 2pm. What to do? Re-tour the castle? Find a coffee shop and really settle in? Nope, I wandered a bit, limited in my enthusiasm for window-shopping by having a roller suitcase and a backpack, and then settled in by the canal for several hours to watch the world, and the canal boats, go by.

So, tomorrow I begin Lady Anne’s Way, 100 miles in ten days of walking, with a day off in the middle. The forecast looks a bit iffy, and there are several days right at the start on which I repeat sections of the Dales Way that I just did, so let me prepare you for the possibility of a bit of trimmed walking and taking of buses. Not committing to it, just saying it might happen, especially when the path goes over the top from Grassington to Kettlewell. If the forecast looks at all rainy, I might give that a pass and find a bus.