Please stand by: Dispatches from England and Wales

^{Editor's note: Follow along TOC Senior Editor Hank Sartin's 275-mile trek across England and Wales via updates from ramblinghank. Read more of Hank's updates on his blog or here in the upcoming weeks.}

Day 9: The ridiculous and the sublime

_{Originally posted Sept. 14}

After a day off, I was eager to get moving again. But my B&B host doesn’t like to start breakfast until 8am, so nothing to be done about that. Last night, as I was relaxing in my room before walking to a pub for dinner, a group of French people arrived. (Warning: gross stereotyping follows.) Though my French is very rusty and was always pretty minimal, I got the sense from an extended bout of loud-voiced discussion, with the one English speaker making enquiries of the host and then going off in extended conversations in French with his companions, that the shared bathroom was creating a scandal on the scale of the Dreyfuss affair. I dreaded the thought that they are walkers and that I might be encountering them again. So at breakfast, I was relieved to see that they were dressed for tourism, not walking. Continue reading ...

---

Day 10: Proustian pasties, precious pigs and cider apples

_{Originally posted Sept. 15}

For the hike from Redbrook to the White Castle (no, I’m not stopping for a hamburger—it’s an actual castle that was at one time painted, sort of, with something that made it white), the sun shone all day with gentle breezes, and the temperature was in the 70s, making for glorious walking, if a bit hot in the mid-afternoon.  Continue reading ...

---

Day 11: May you rise to meet the road…

_{Originally posted Sept. 16}

The day started with that sublimely silly drive back to the White Castle so that I could walk three miles and end up in the garden of the B&B where I had breakfast only an hour and a half earlier. I was glad I did it, though, since it gave me the chance to talk with my host, a voluble conversationalist who could give the Irish a run for their money in that line. The road outside the B&B is being resurfaced, which is of course good news, but the project has been hit by a budgeting problem due to the unexpectedly high number of drains they’ve encountered that need to restructured. Apparently no one has an accurate drain count, and they assumed some specific number in the 60s for a three mile stretch. Continue reading ...

---

Day 12: You take the high road

_{Originally posted Sept. 17}

Before I start the day’s narrative, a snatch of overheard dialogue: While Kathy and Keith and I were eating dinner in the pub of the Crown Inn, our Longtown accommodation last night, there were two young guys (early 20s) playing quoits, a ring-toss game with rules I never did quite work out. Continue reading ...

---

Day 13: Please stand by

_{Originally posted Sept. 18}

This post is currently being lovingly crafted from the finest materials, with yarns being spun as you read. (translation: I was too tired to write last night and I’ve got to leave soon, so I’ll write about day 13 and day 14 both once I am in Knighton tonight, where I also get a rest day on Monday) Continue reading ...