Day 12: Keld to Reeth (Low Route)

Expectations

This is the route I expect to take. Prettier than the high route, and it has pubs 🙂

12.17 miles from Butt House/Keld Lodge to Cambridge House/The Manse in Reeth.

Realities

Oh gosh, what a day! Maybe the hardest yet.

For one thing, awful wi-fi again. I’m down in the guest lounge at Cambridge House, where wi-fi connection includes internet. Up in our room on the third floor, there’s fabulous wi-fi signal strength, but no internet.

All that might have resulted in a mild shrug, but it comes at the end of maybe the hardest day to date. We split into three groups–all the women took the low route, the male Cs took the high route, and the male L took the bus.

It was incredibly hot. Hotter than Hawaii according to news reports. And let’s face it, if we were in Hawaii, we’d be sipping Mai Tais, wearing bikinis, half submerged in the surf. Not walking 12.57 miles (938 ft elevation gain)! Our host said 31C (88F). I think the official high was 30C  (86F)

The final challenge was that I had somehow not loaded the low route into Outdoor Map Navigator (OMN) on my phone. So I was having to navigate with a combo of Stedman and comparison to where OMN said we were. So much harder than following the track on OMN.

Woke up to lovely (misleading) sunshine

We set out at about 9am. Walked the first mile or so together, then the high routers took off (anticipating lower temps and less bugs) and the low routers soldiered on (expecting prettier environs, less climb, and maybe higher temps/more bugs.)

As a member of the lower routers, I can only accurately portray that experience. Initially, very pretty. We bypassed Muker (too early for anything to be open) and enjoyed the surprisingly wide valley of the River Swale. Temperatures OK.

Arrived–a long time later–at Gunnerside, debating whether to enjoy a cream tea at the tea rooms or a refreshing drink at the pub.

Turns out that the tea rooms were closed all day and the pub didn’t open for another half hour. We ate our picnic lunch–in a stroppy mood–at the pub tables clearly marked “Do not eat your own food here.” Took enough time that the pub finally opened and we each had a refreshing, luxurious glass of iced mineral water. Ahhhhhh.

Then what felt like a tough climb out of Gunnerside. I doubt we’d have even counted it as a climb on a normal-temperature day. But it was getting steamy. Plod plod plod.

More plodding.

Had occasional connection via walkie-talkie with the high routers, but it was never a clear connection, usually dropping crucial verbs or nouns or both. Eventually the low routers’ walkie-talkie died completely and that was that!

Trudged on through Healaugh (HEAL-LAUGH? or He-a-low? or Heal-ow?) but with the promise of an ice-cream in  Reeth.

Finally limped into Reeth at 3:30 (maybe?) meeting the high-routers at the ice-cream parlour. I should really have taken a photo of the ice-cream before eating most of it, but cooling down took precedence.

Felt restored, but then hit a collapse of morale when the “400m out of town” accommodation proved to be twice as far as I thought–up hill of course.

Nice accommodation. Offered us tea and cake, in the garden. Which would have been lovely in normal temperatures, but felt smothering in this heat.

STILL TOO HOT. Tepid bath helped.

Interesting method of preventing concussions:

Headed back down the  hill and met up with Ls (staying right in town) for dinner.

Oh what a dinner. The stuff that memories are made of.

Table reserved for 7:30pm. Had some drinks first (note to self: never order flat cider again) then we were led into a deserted back room (second time on this trip that the Americans have been tucked away in the back…hmmmm). Waiter explained that food was all individually prepped, not from frozen, so it would take 45 minutes or so. We actually got our entrees at 9pm. By then, reasonably pickled (us, not the food) but not enough to disguise the reality that the food was, er, mediocre at best. And the service was just extraordinarily slow, defensive, argumentative, and weird.

It was a memorably bad meal in every sense, except for the camaraderie of two families tittering our way through a cultural experience.

Tomorrow: forecast to be slightly cooler tomorrow with a risk of thunderstorms. At least one L plans to take the bus, the rest of us plan to sweat our way through the 10 miles to Richmond. We ALL plan to rest up for a day on Thursday!