Simply 60

Walking the dogs

It seems I did a little inadvertent smuggling. Namely, the weather in the Cotswolds. I arrived back to a sweltering Concord yesterday, only to have the temps dive into the 50's overnight and today, I swear, a Cotswold day here — dry, blue blue sky, temps in the mid-70s. How nice to be a bellwether of, well, beautiful weather.

So, of course, being a Cotswold kind of day, I took a walk. Cajun took advantage of the outing to exercise her chasing skills, wreaking havoc on the heart rates of several chipmunks and, generally speaking, being a fine companion. But I kept looking behind me for my sidekick. Not there. She is back in Michigan resuming her life just as I am, no doubt walking her own two dogs and not her sibling, just as I was. Still, I kept looking back, feeling her presence, a phantom sister.

I wonder if, at 70, I will be able to do what she did — walk nearly 50 miles in 96 hours with nary a grumble. Not only did she never once complain, neither did her bunions (if she has them). Her feet, her back, her knees, her energy, her spirits came to the challenge in good working order and stayed that way.

Which makes me ask: did we really come from the same DNA pool?

Thought #2: it just occurred to me that we were both, as it were, walking our dogs in the Cotswolds, too. The ones with five digits each.

Truffle: A big, old, only-75%-lean, juicy, genuine American hamburger.

Quote of the day: "Be sure to put your feet in the right place, then stand firm." (Abraham Lincoln)

Home again, or, How odd

How very peculiar. Here I am sitting in the Thoreau Room of the Concord Free Public Library. This morning I was fending off a rain shower in London. My body seems to travel faster, or with greater ease, than my head.

How odd and wonderful to be home again. Life in the backyard shows signs of the simplest changes, the river is lower, the dahlias higher. But the things that matter most, the creatures that comfort (one two-footed, the other four), are breathtakingly the same. It's as if I never left, in this one crucial way. 

You may ask, then, why it is, if I just got off a plane, that I am in the library and not still sitting in the Adirondack chairs, chewing the fat with Pete and lobbing a soggy tennis ball into the river for Cajun. The answer is an interesting twist on one of the key aspects of my time abroad — our fancy 21st century communication tools (email, Skype, cell phones, iChat) are, at best, flawed technology. There was not a day over the past two weeks in England when either I or Liza did not have some major techo-snafu to deal with. Her computer flat out would not work; Safari spun its little connecting wheel into the infinite future on mine; broadband wires were out; black holes chopped off conversations with reckless abandon; she fried her English wall plug; I left mine behind; etc ad nauseum.

Imagine my surprise to return to America and my well wired household to find the modem blown? A storm last week, apparently. And so, once again, devotion to blog required extraordinary measures. Which brings me, both by topic and physical location, to the library.

Murphy's Law, it would appear, knows no international boundaries.

 Truffle: MOTL and roses

Quote of the day: "There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." (Nelson Mandela)

Sister act

Sometimes the best memory is the unexpected one. And often it comes in the smallest package. Try to make a memory for a child and what he/she brings away from your expectation is some ort you could not possibly have expected. I don't know what Liza's expectations were, and as far as mine were concerned, all were met — that all plans came off without a hitch, that the weather cooperated (particularly as we slogged eight or nine hours a day across what might otherwise have been mud baths), that there were no mishaps of note and that I personally could make a bum toe go along with an exceptionally trying program. 

But what the memories are we individually take away? That/those remain to be seen. Or not seen but culled. So much has happened, so many 'events', so much seen and absorbed and recorded on some memory chip somewhere in our sensory-overloaded minds that it will take time and reflection and, probably at Christmas, rehashing and relaughing.

What I am grateful for is this time with my big sister. The ten years that separate us made it impossible for us to share such time and times when we were younger. At nine, I recall visiting her sorority at the University of Louisville and thinking, "Wow, that was cool. But I will never be that old." That old was nineteen, my sister's age at the time. So a lifetime had to pass, while I grew up behind her and she grew free of the responsibilities of motherhood; while I did my career thing and so did she. Until now, at 60 and 70, for God's sake, finally, a time has come for us to be together and re-explore who we are to each other, why we have always known we valued the other, the compatibility that true sisters can mine when time affords a convenient opportunity to do so.

Aren't we lucky that time was on our side?

Truffle: Savoring this trip, eyes closed, as Stella blasts down the M6, all of us — she, her mother, Liza and me — heading for our respective homes.

Quote of the day: "The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." (St. Augustine)

Flopsy Wolfe and Mopsy Stout

I learned many things today. 1) Beatrix Potter's draconian mother allowed her daughter to visit her for only an hour a week, on Sundays. 2)Windermere, Bowness on Windermere and all the other lakeland villages and hamlets we visited that are the core of the Lake District are part of a national park, but not such as in America and other countries, where there is evidence of a restraining presence. 3) Many place and geographic names in these parts come from the Norse. My favorite: tarn. It comes from the Norse word tjorn and means teardrop. Tarn is used in place of the word lake when the body of water is small and nestled high in the fells. Teardrop. Wonderful, no?

We did not get into Mr. McGregor's garden today but we certainly got into Beatrix Potter's. Our day was an exploration of her life and world among the lakes. From Hilltop House to Mr. Heelis' (aka Mr. Beatrix) office in Hawkshead to a huge farm she owned outside Coniston to Lindeth Howe, the house she bought for her mother (neatly placed a ferry ride away from Hilltop) and now a hotel where we are staying. Our guide spoke very seriously of Peter and Jemima Puddleduck and Timmy Tiptoes and the like, pointing out the spots that inspired their creation as if they were historic monuments. En route we visited the grammar school attended by Wordsworth, where he is said to have carved his name (it's there, but who/when it was carved is a matter of conjecture), met (from across the fence) indigenous Herdwick sheep (sweet-faced creatures with rasta fleece), motored up and back Coniston lake, walked past Ruskin's gigantic fellside house midway above it, visited Wray Castle (a conceit built by a conceited doctor in the mid-1800's), saw thriving California redwoods on the grounds and drove on to hidden Tarn Hows, one of those up-fell small lakes so beautiful it might rightfully inspire poetry.

I confess to being surprisingly taken with Miss Potter. She escaped her mother though it took most of her life and her health to do so; she apparently was a superb land manager (the National Trust asked her to manage a farm she had donated to them); she was a gifted illustrator with a lovely sense of color and wrote stories both tender and mischeivous, which seem to be synonimous with her own character. This Beatrix Potter business started out as something that would appeal to Liza as a preschool teacher. Imagine the shock to my cynical self to be touched by a rabbit drunk on stolen carrots?

Truffle: The final scone and clotted cream (with strawberry jam, of course) of this visit to England

Quote of the day: "It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is 'soporific'." (Beatrix Potter, from The Tales of the Flopsy Bunnies)

Swan's way

The verb form of taxidermy is: to stuff. It was a swan's doing, the stuffed male in the Eltermere Inn parlor gave birth to this inquiry. There is the act (taxidermy), there is the artisan (the taxidermist) but what is the correct word for the action performed by the artisan to complete the act? Our subject, said swan, reigned over Elterwater Lake until a younger male sought to take his place. The innkeepers found him in the throes of death and when he died decided to...what...have him taxidermed?? Turns out an autopsy was required as all swans in Britian belong to the Queen (a British oddity if ever there was one). Cause of death: broken neck, most likely caused by a younger rival male contesting the territory. So stuffing occurred, giving new life in death to this elegant haughty swan with dominance still twinkling in his eye. According the available dictionaries (iPhone aps), what happened to the swan to land him in the parlor was that he was stuffed. You know, like stuffed animals in nurseries everywhere.

We trained (four in all) all day yesterday to move our chess pieces from the Cotswolds to the land of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ruskin, deQuincey, with a one-night respite yesterday from all our adventuring at Eltermere Inn on Lake Elterwater, an oasis, it turns out, nestled at the bottom of the Langdale fells. Stella, who knows the innkeepers, fetched us from the Windermere train station and we installed ourselves for a perfect evening of conversation, celebration (Stella learned she is to be a mother-in-law), fine wine, good food and stellar company in a truly unspoiled corner of the lakes.

 Wordworth, what's left of him, is no doubt face down in his grave by now rather than cast his hollow eyes at what has become of his precious untrammeled homeland among the lakes. For me it was a case of double deja vous. Coming first upon Lake Windermere I could have been looking at Moosehead Lake in Maine - a long deep blue body of water with tree-studded islands stretching into the distance between sandwiching green hillsides. In the next instant, it was Nantucket in August I recognized - bumper to bumper traffic, oversized humans slobbering over ice cream cones, overspilling trash cans, fast food restaurants, sidewalks teeming with shoppers, tour groups, even a bride, and everything geared toward spending or making money.Ironically Wordsworth, in his veneration of the pastoral beauty of these lakes and felds has been instrumental in their ruination. He himself has become a tourist destination (and yes, I too visited his grave this morning).

Why is it that mankind's response to natural beauty is to venerate it to death? Worship it into commercialism? My heart broke all afternoon long.

Truffle: A morning walking with Stella and Liza before breakfast through fields to a brook all nestled in the embrace of the felds, where the only sound was of water dancing over the creekbed stones.

Quote of the day: "Keep an eye on port, for you know not your day or time." (memorial to sailors lost in a storm on Lake Windermere)

Change of scene

Ah, but to be brief tonight, as the internet WiFi does not work where we are now, and I have begged time on our inn's office computer (what devotion, blah, blah, blah, Part II). There has been a radical change of scene: from Cotswold village and hiking boots laden with sheep droppings to girly shoes and a posh inn in the Lake District. The Eltermere Inn on Elterwater Lake, just outside Windermere, owned and operated by old friends of Stella and Peter's. But it's the difference between Nantucket in August (Windemere) and Nantucket in October (Elterwater). We have rejoined Stella here, with her gorgeous mother Ruth, whose blue eyes make Paul Newman's look hazel. More on all this when I locate, if I locate, internet access in this English paradise on the morrow (morrow? well, yes. The poetry here is contagious.)

Truffle: This astonishingly tranquil piece of the world. Here, a modernday Wordsworth could ramble among daffodils just as the historic one did, see exactly what he saw and write the same poem.

Quote of the day: (whatelse? Abbreviated Wordsworth)

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The Cotswold Way

Cotswold walk, Day Four, scorecard:

Miles walked: 5 (abbreviated route)

Route by village: Broadway to Chipping Camden

Hours walked:  3 hours

Times gone astray: 0 

Times led astray:  0

Shortcuts: 0

Mishaps: 0 (luck o'the Irish — Liza left her camera behind on a picnic table as we set off after a break; someone spotted it and shouted after us. Phew!)

Temp: 75° (partly sunny)

B&B: The White Hart Royal, Moreton-in-the-Marsh (A)

Instead of a shortcut, we cut it short today, walking only from Broadway to Chipping Camden, a decision that both energized us and allowed us to enjoy for an entire afternoon one of these splendid Cotswold villages. A decision that also knocked eight miles and five hours off our walking time. When you think about it, that's a considerable investment in our enjoyment of where we are (instead of where we're going).

And now to: An Ode to English Footpaths. How marvelous they are! 

For the best part of the last two days we have been following the Cotswold Way, a national walking path that covers 100 miles, from Bath to Chipping Camden, dedicated only in 2007. Unlike our first two days of walking, when the navigation was tricky, weaving off and on footpaths (some just read 'public' if there was signage at all), the Cotswold Way is beautifully marked and maintained. Thanks to the Cotswold Voluntary Wardens (whoever they may be, village to village). It was a pleasure to walk their walk, in large measure because I was navigating and they made it so simple I could enjoy myself instead of concentrating on the marginal directions we were issued.

While the Cotswold Way is a stellar example of a walking trail in Britain, the mere allowance of public access across private land is a gift both to the nation and to walkers everywhere. Over the course of our four days on the hoof, we have crossed golf courses, Iron Age ramparts, fully planted hay fields, in front of a manor houses (including one 'ha ha', an ornamental landscaping feature), alongside a castle and a gas pipeline construction site, through farmyards, across a million sheep pastures, around cattle (with posted notice of a bull on premises) and grazing horses, past red deer, and a fulling mill, up hill to folly and down dale to the rivers Windrush and Eye, into woods (lost and found within), along country lanes and back into farmers' fields, and from village to village the way farmers, merchants, barons, peasants and pilgrims approaches these places since time. Thank you, England.

Truffle: A body that responded (in spite of multiple yellow flags) to the most arduous physical challenge I've undertaken since the NYCity marathon in 1994, 44.5 miles in four days.

Quote of the day: "For there is no friend like a sister, in calm or stormy weather, to cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands." (Christina Rosetti)

Duck or Grouse

Cotswold walk, Day Three, scorecard:

Miles walked: 11.5

Route by village: Winchcombe, Stump Cross, Stanway Wood, Stanway, Stanton, Buckland, Broadway.

Hours walked: Just under 8 hours

Times gone astray: 0 (Hoorah!)

Times led astray:  0

Shortcuts: 0

Mishaps: 0 

Temp: 75° and sunny (72° yesterday, 70° the day before — maybe this isn't the Cotswolds after all)

B&B: Dove Cottage (B)

What price devotion to this blog? I'll tell you. In Broadway it is 6.50 pounds. No internet cafe, no access at our B&B, so off to the Lygon Arms, the most venerable hotel in town, hoping to cop a little free WiFi. Only to find they make their patrons pay. Wine's expensive too.

Today's walk, I swear, was all up hill. Very uphill. Very very uphill. In many ways it was a day of reckoning. Liza forgot to fill her water bottle this morning, so we had only mine for the duration; there was no stopping point for lunch; or for peeing; we experienced equipment failure (Liza's telescoping walking stick snapped a band making it go limp like a overcooked noodle); and the walk was a mile longer than advertised. So once again we entered a lovely Cotswold town just in time to see it close up for the night.

Taking stock, we've decided to walk to Chipping Camden tomorrow and bus it back to Moreton-in-the-Marsh. This will give us the afternoon to enjoy a village for a change.

The journey to Broadway was easily 90 percent sheep pasture. Liza took full advantage of this development and collected a backpack full of raw wool, this being deposited everywhere like hair from a teenage girl's hairbrush. Starting off from Winchcombe afforded us the most interesting aspects of our walk today. We visited Hailes Church, built in the 1150's, with recently discovered and unveiled (the veil of time, doncha know) frescos, including a gigantic one of St. Christopher. Since he's the patron saint of travelers and across the road was the ruins of the Medieval Hailes Abbey, his presence makes absolute sense. Then we climbed (that upward mobility again) to the highest point above it, where Cromwell is said to have watched the abbey burn after Henry VIII ordered all the monasteries burned. Henry VIII — to much appetite for his own good. Or England's.

Never was any oasis more gratefully attained than Broadway's Crown & Horse pub, as we fell off our walk and back into civilization.

Truffle: Two signs. One in our B&B in Broadway this evening, a converted medieval dovecote and, so, peppered with low beams. On one was this sign: "Duck or Grouse." A second sign as we crossed a cattle field this afternoon, it a cautionary yellow with the words: "Bull in field."

Quote of the day: "As we grow old . . . the beauty steals inward." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

How diverting the diversion

Cotswold walk, Day Two, scorecard:

Miles walked: 14.5

Route by village: Bourton-on-the-Water, Naunton, Guiting Power and, eventually, Winchcombe

Hours walked: 9 hours

Times gone astray: 2 — net loss: 1.5 miles

Times led astray:  0

Shortcuts: 0

Mishaps: 0 (if you don't count a diversion with insufficient instruction)

B&B: Jenny Cheshire (B+)

Cardinal maxim of walking holidays: if you keep on walking, eventually you will arrive somewhere. Let me tell you, there were times today when this thought was heartening.

We knew we were in for the longest walking day of the four. What we weren't counting on was a diversion around a natural gas pipeline building project in the middle of a forest - Guiting Wood, to be exact — that we got wind of only over breakfast. I did my best but ultimately I failed navigation 202. Whereowhere was my husband, the woodsman??? It's one of those times when you know why cell phones are worth their weight in gold. From the forest, this emergency tether to the tour office proved invaluable. We soldiered on and, finally, having come in too late for the premier sight — Sudeley Castle — in the area which closed before we could get to it, we reached Winchcombe and headed straight for the nearest pub. 

Yesterday, when we were full of vim and vigor and enthusiasm for our adventure, we seemed to race from one stile to the next. Today, I at least awoke so stiff you'd have thought I was glued to a board. So getting started took a little longer but then we steadfastly clomped on, with the charming Windrush River as our sole companion for most of the way. We fell into one charming village after another but not before wending our way through forest and field, including straight through the middle of planted fields of hay, so blue it made Kentucky bluegrass pale by comparison. We rested more often today, including outside the churchyard of Guiting Power's Norman church, as well as on many a clump of roadside grass.

But after lunch, which would be after Guiting Power, our walk became an interminable slog, beginning with a punishing climb up a rock-strewn and narrow path, then getting lost, finding our way only to discover we had a 3-mile uphill climb just to descend another two to town.

No wonder, when we reached Winchcombe, it was the pub we wanted. A glass'o, to be sure. But first, water (we were out) and secondly food. The wine didn't come into the mix until the more primitive needs were met.

And now to sleep in hope of rest......

Truffle: A cacophony of bleating behind a wall of trees. The first real farm sounds we've heard after two full days of hiking in the Cotswolds. We rounded a corner and came upon a full-scale, old-fashioned sheep shearing. Great swaths of wool, the shape of a little lamb, tossed to one side while the lamb itself jumped and bucked and headed for freedom but not without much vocal fanfare.

Quote of the day: "Life offers us tickets to places which we have not knowingly asked for." (Maya Angelou)

Kate-on-the-Wold

Cotswold walk, Day One, scorecard:

Miles walked: 13.5

Route by village: Morton-in-the-Marsh to Bourton-on-the-Water via Longborough, Donnington, Broadwell, Stow-on-the-Wold, Lower Slaughter, Bourton-on-the-Water

Hours walked: 8 hours

Times gone astray: 2 — net loss: .75 miles

Times led astray: 2 — net loss: .75 miles

Shortcuts: .5 miles

Falls: Kate (1), Liza (0)

Consequences of falls: 0

State of broken big toe: excellent. Made the journey without once complaining. 

B&B: Landsdowne Villas (C)-

England in June. No time could be better for walking than this. Their world is a riot of flowers, some wild, many cultivated (because, after all, the English love their flowers). Today we had the finest of conditions — lovely temps (low 70's), breezes from time to time. We set out from Fosseway Farm, our less than fine B&B, which was located on the old Roman Fosse Way, across thistle-covered fields, through cool woods, hill, dale, valley, village. We lunched at the Fox Inn pub in Broadwell, had tea (the beverage plus freshly baked scones, clotted cream — be still my beating heart and it almost was —& strawberry jam) in Lower Slaughter (slaughter means 'muddy' not bloodbath) and finally arrived in Bourton-on-the-Water. Bourton is reputed to be the most beautiful and hence the most visited village in the Cotswolds, with the River Windrush running through its midsts. Once we limped, hot, sweaty and exhausted to our less-than-nice B&B, soaked our feet in a tub of cold water and recovered (ever so slightly), we found a nice pub with patio dining by the river and have a couple of medicinal glasses of wine and a bite.

Tomorrow we face our longest day. If we fail to get lost, however, it will be shorter than today. But not by much. 

To bed/With my peds/Which ache/ as if baked.

What a day. We made it. Of course Liza would. But I did too. Which is food for astonishment.

Truffle: Pulling up a corner of cow field, stretching out under a blue-blue sky, next to a tiny babbling brook, in the shade of an ancient oak, and looking up - with wonder. (No cows incidentally, just meadow muffins)

Quote of the day: "Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter." (Izaak Walton)