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!