LEJOG day 19: Painswick to Gloucester

Following my rest day, I've today walked 9 miles- I was at my bed and breakfast by lunchtime. Of course I managed to get lost more times in three hours than in the last three days, but no matter.

Painswick was very pretty, the weather was lovely, and so I spent most of the day in my room trying not to get sunstroke in my only day-off clothes, which feature black jeans. The result was that I've read "Persuasion" and "Sense and Sensibility" from cover-to-cover in the space of two and a half days, one of them a day in which I walked for six hours.

Today I got up, had a comparatively light breakfast (...cereal, fruit salad, scrambled eggs on toast and a croissant is light, ok?) and set off. Once I'd left the Cotswold Way, though, the trouble started. I was supposed to be following the Wysis way, which on the few waymarkers I saw claimed to connect the Offa's Dyke path with the Thames Valley, but it didn't really want to be followed. I do wonder how much demand there is for a trail connecting two other significant trails, given how little wear it seems to get.

It at least got me over the M5 (again) but not without losing me in a wood, a field, on some kind of race track possibly for motorbikes, another field, a golf course and a country park- where none of the paths marked on the map existed and all the paths that exist aren't marked on the map. Not a problem if you're out for a Sunday stroll; kind of a problem if you're trying to get somewhere and the path has just taken a U-turn.

I then let Googlemaps take the wheel as soon as I hit a road in Gloucester, and in return it took me on a magical mystery tour of some moderately unsavoury-appearing suburbs of Gloucester, then through the hospital grounds, in order to reach my B&B.

Tomorrow I'm following the Severn Way, and seeing as how it's a pretty big river at this point, I feel fairly safe in betting it'll be as marked on the map.

Distance walked: 9.32 miles
Time: 3h10
Percentage completed: 26.7%
Miles per £1 of boot: 3.13
Lunch: M&S hoi sin duck wrap, chocolate flapjack and vanilla yoghurt smoothie- I splashed out
Last (two) nights' B&B: Tibbiwell Lodge, Painswick: quiet, comfortable, and with two gorgeous golden labradors

 "What gravestone would Dad want?"
"A PYRAMID!"

 It was hazy today

It's a Cathedral! No photos of the inside because you have to buy a photography permit, boo

Comments

  1. Latti11 May 2017 at 21:38

    We have completed half of The Offas Dyke path by now and one third of our complete walk. Sending best wishes for tomorrows walk from Drewin Farm. Maren and Arne

    ReplyDelete

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