GetAwayFromTheGames.com

For those of you who don't live in London and therefore have not had the delight over the last few months of constant reminders to carefully plan your travel during the Olympics - including by the Mayor himself, Boris Johnson, via recorded audio messages that surprise you on the underground - this is a witty inversion of the web address set up to help with this planning, GetAheadOfTheGames.com. We have followed this advice and carefully planned an Olympic Escape - in fact I am writing this on the train, as it speeds out of London, heading to the North West of England. Carlisle, to be specific, from where we will be starting our Great Walk of Hadrian's Wall.

We're starting our holiday by travelling in the height of luxury - First Class on the train (due to the vagaries of the British rail network sometimes it only costs a little bit more than Second Class!) and the first couple of nights in a quite-nice-looking hotel near the Cathedral. The level of luxury will decrease quite quickly - in a few nights we'll be youth hostelling in a place that provides no meals!

This afternoon's post-arrival plans are to see the Castle & Cathedral and have a nice dinner! Early tomorrow morning we will get a bus to the western-most point of the wall, and walk back along the Solway Firth. After that it's rucksacks hoisted and the proper walking begins. I'm a little nervous, as it's pretty much my first walking holiday since going to Iceland on an A-level Geography field trip about 20 years ago, and the rucksacks are pretty heavy... But excited too, to see Hadrian's Wall and all the Romano-British archaeology along there, as well as the amazing landscape. I'm especially looking forward to spending time outside and taking exercise, because it feels like I have been locked up inside chained to my desk for the whole of this year so far, and much of last year!

Our reward at the end of the walk - which we have planned to take about 9 days - is to spend a few days chilling out on the Northumbrian coast with some friends who have a cottage up there. I am also looking forward to getting some good use out of our English Heritage and National Trust memberships!!

I don't plan to spend any time looking at emails or really keeping in touch with the outside world, though I may be moved to blog as we have our adventures along the Wall. In case I don't, enjoy the Games!

A New Year's Walk

Since we seem to have spent much of the Christmas holidays inside, much of the time cooking and then eating (and our New Year's Day housewarming do was a great success and lots of fun), we decided to dedicate the extra New Year bank holiday, on 2 January, to going for a long walk. I wanted to get on a train and go out of London and walk in the country, preferably taking in something of antiquarian interest along the way. And, courtesy of the excellent National Trails website, we found the perfect walk - along the bit of the South Downs Way which skirts the Cuckmere Valley. The downloadable PDF told us which trains and buses we needed to take to the start of our walk and even provided an extract of the right bit of Ordnance Survey map, which we popped onto the iPad and took walking with us! Very handy for zooming in to check which path you need to take at crossroads etc...


We had the most idyllic weather - gorgeous cloudless blue skies and lovely sunny weather, though it as very cold once the sun set. We took a train to Lewes - from handy Victoria - then another train to Seaford, from where we took a local bus to Exceat, then set off across the valley - which was somewhat squelchily muddy thanks to the rain on New Year's Day. There was a white horse cut into the chalky hillside (= antiquarian interest) and our walk took us to the brilliantly-named Litlington where we paused for lunch in the lovely Plough & Harrow pub, before setting off up slightly higher and more wooded ground for the second half of the walk. At the end of which the footpath opened up on to the most amazing vista over the estuary, where the river meets the sea, with its winding channels and waterlogged tributaries glinting in the sunlight. We sat and looked at the view for a goodly while.


We made our way back to Lewes where we stopped off to visit the ruins of the Priory (= more antiquarian interest), which was dissolved by Henry VIII and meticulously dismantled by his engineers - and therefore of interest to K's book research. We had a walk around Lewes, which neither of us had ever been to before and which is really beautiful with a rather fine castle, though surprisingly lacking in good, quaint places to find a cup of tea and a piece of cake - or certainly on 2 Jan! After a refreshment pause, at disappointing Caffè Nero, we got the train back to London - and we were home in time to cook dinner and sit down in front of the new series of Sherlock!

A wonderfully idyllic day and hopefully an auspicious start to 2012!