Cost-Benefit Analysis

Joan & I are about ready to leave in a few hours for the Portsmouth Transportation Center and then to Logan for our 7:10 departure on BA # 212 for London Heathrow and thence by train to Paddington Station, Moreston-in-Marsh and finally arriving at Chipping Camden tomorrow early afternoon. I used to do this transatlantic travel stuff a few decades ago at the drop of a business meeting in London or Madrid but it’s been a while and the human body gets less tolerant of being jerked around as we get older. I also occurs to me how much clutter and stuff we’re put aside as “don’t need that” as we pack out backpacks for our walk in the Cotswolds over the next 14 or so days. 

At one point in my life – pre-Joan, footloose divorced Dad days – I had a 250 things rule in my life. Everything that I owned was a thing; my car was a thing, a suit was a thing, a pair of skis was a thing. The total of all my stuff that surrounded me and weighed me down was limited to 250 things; why that number you might ask. It was because I’d found that that was about the limit of things I could stuff into my VW 412 wagon!  Anyway, as I look around me now, our big house, garage, cellar and artic are stuffed with things, accumulated over the past 30 years and all essential, needed or wanted at the time but too some not used for many years. Going on a long walking trip, carrying everything you’ll use in your backpack and feeling the weight step after step has  a wonderful way of clarifying what you really need and what you don’t in a very dramatic manner. We have a precise scale that we use to weigh everything – in ounces! – that goes into the backpack and our goal is to carry no more than 10% of our body weight. For me, that’s a limit of 17 pounds but anything over 15 pounds feels like too much on my 80 year old legs.

That damn scale causes all sort of financial cost/benefit decisions to be faced. For instance, is the new Patagonia Nano Puff jacket that weighs only 8.3 ounces and costs $350 worth the 11 ounces it saves over the $100 EMS Ascent nano jacket that I now have? That 11 oz. difference represents a 5% savings in my total weight at a cost of $22 per ounce. The Patagonia also packs down to a fraction of the size of my old one. I did all the calcs, decided “yes, it was worth it”, and drove 70 miles to the REI store only to find out they didn’t have any more large size jackets in stock. So much for analysis!

Ready for departure - British Air, here we come!

June 19^th, 2015

And away we go!  Joan & I leave this coming Monday for a fortnight (that’s two weeks in Brit-speak) walking a hundred-odd miles through beautiful & historic English countryside, staying in farmhouses, B & B’s, pubs, hotels and country inns every night and in general taking a gentle training "glide path" before we resume our aborted Camino de Santiago pilgrimage later this  year.  We abandoned our Camino in late September, 2013 when Sam had to call it quits in Logrono, Spain because his right ankle finally gave out. After Sam underwent a total ankle replacement operation in August last year, putt in lots of PT and gym time and now is walking “mostly normally” albeit as a ¾ bionic man (fused left ankle, replacement joints in right knee and ankle), we’re ready to hit the road! An if everything goes alright in England, then we hope to return to Spain this September for a month.

The Cotswold Way National Trail is a scenic, undulating route through quiet Cotswold countryside basically following a 350 meter high limestone ridge through the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and passing through the villages of Broadway, Winchcombe, and Wotton-under-Edge. An attractive and popular trail that offers beautiful rural surroundings with facilities and services always near to hand, the 102 mile route starts at Chipping Campden and ends at Bath. We plan on doing this the easy way, so if bad rain, twitchy knees or just plain lassitude call for it, we may just hop a bus or cab to the next town. Once we get to Bath, we plan on taking a bus tour to Stonehenge for a day to satisfy our inner mystic quest while honoring Joan's Celtic (maybe even Druid) roots.

This is basically a “Rewards” trip for us. Joan endured six months of her interim assignment to run the operations at the Mind & Life Institute in Hadley, MA; this finished June 1^st. After our plans to “snow-bird” together – Sam, Finnegan (dog), Maeve (cat) & Joan - last winter in Amherst were burned out by a scary (but injury free) fire last December at our rented house there, the first three moved back to Arundel. Joan drove home 150 miles every weekend but we each led separate lives of quiet desperation, while enduring the worst winter season in recent memory. Sometime during the Freaky February barrage of blizzards, when drifts finally covered every exit of our home in Arundel and the snow-blower couldn’t throw the snow over the drifts, we decided to go somewhere nice. For a while we were planning on doing the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, but the Cotswolds looked ever so much gentler on the spirit and body. And at least we speak their language in England (sort of) so the difficulties in understanding each other that we had in Spain shouldn’t be as much of a problem. 

Now if we can just remember to look the English way (eyes right!) when crossing the road!