Southwest Coast Path

We are here in jolly ol’ England visiting a friend to get out of Schengen and to stay under the 90 days out of 180 days rule for Europe. We decided to take advantage of our friend’s workweek and hike the Southwest Coast Path, which is a 1000 kilometer hike on England’s, wait for it, southwest coast:).

Regarding jolly ol’ England, people here really are nice and overtly polite and friendly. Sometimes it made me wonder if there is a collective competition for congeniality within the country with some award given out that the winner would undoubtedly be too humble to accept:). There are worse traits.

Only having 4/5 days to backpack , we started our hike from Ilfracombe and made our way to Minehead. Amazingly this 1000 kilometer hike has the equivalent of hiking up three Mt Everest’s, which doesn’t surprise me given any lake or coastal hike is often a never ending up and down hike.

Felt good to exercise my backpacking muscles again. I was pretty taken by how dramatically beautiful the hike wound up being. The hills were as stereotypically green as those you would picture in Ireland. Sheep dot all the hillsides constantly bahing accusations at us. Rhododendrons wallpapered the landscape creating a gorgeous purple and green alongside cliffs overlooking an ocean with waters as blue as the Caribbean.

There were numerous old fishing towns that have been transformed into quaint retirement communities. In many ways it reminded me of Maine. You probably could do this hike staying in towns the whole way but most just wild camp and stop whenever they feel done for the day. Stacy and I didn’t do this because we looked it up ahead of time and thought it was illegal to do, but they don’t exactly have Rangers to enforce anything.

The first day was pretty easy, only 7ish miles, followed by just over 15 miles on day 2 and then 11 miles on day 3. In addition to the quaint old fishing towns, we would occasionally come across castles and mansions from a time gone by. Places that appeared as if they should be massive hotels but instead were occupied by small but lavishly wealthy families. Being a travel blog I’ll keep my thoughts against such dynasties to myself 🙄.

Unfortunately I had new shoes and socks and got some pretty bad blisters during the downhill hikes towards the end of day 2. After hiking 11 additional miles on 2 blisters, I felt done. Fortunately, jolly ol’ England, we met a couple at camp who offered us a ride to the next town, which was to be our stopping point anyway. I would highly recommend this hike to all and was only sad that we didn’t have more time to hike it. Czytaj więcej