Coast to Coast Day 13 - Osmotherley to Great Broughton

June 7, 2015

Miles: 15.1
Time: 9:08 - 5:04
Elevation gain: 3,187'

Year to date miles: 364.8

Hike description:

 Every day we walk. It is becoming hard to remember where we started each morning. Or maybe I'm just tired. All of the people we meet seem to have a problem remembering where they are headed the next day.

I love the patterns of our days here. We wake up 45 minutes before breakfast and  finish our morning chores - getting our lunch prepared, getting our packs ready, stuffing everything else into our luggage.

We tend to eat the same thing every morning - almost every place has the same breakfast menu. After breakfast and coffee, we put our luggage in the hall to be picked up by Packhorse, and then we are out the door and our hike has started. I love that we don't need to drive to our hike. We are always on our journey.

After yesterday's craziness at dinner, the Inn owner was very helpful and accommodating at breakfast. The town of Osmotherley is a little ways off the normal  route, so we came up with some trails to get back to the normal route. It is not called "The Coast to Coast Walk" but is called "A Coast to Coast Walk". Everyone's routes are slightly different.

Our Harvey maps aren't high enough resolution, so our exit trail from the town didn't end up being the one we thought we were on. No problem. We did end up losing our public footpath at a farm - and ended up walking around their pastures looking for a trail. We ended up having to use our GPS to find a way to cut over to the trail we wanted to be on - The Cleveland Way. 

We spent the morning leapfrogging the 2 Canadians and 2 of the Australians. We are seeing fewer Coast to Coast hikers all of the time it seems. Others we started with are now on a different schedule than us. The Australians are finishing the same day as we are. Glen is happy that there will be other people to celebrate with us.

Today was spent hiking through the moors. I was picturing moors as being flat. Maybe they are, but we did a lot of climbing steeply up and down. Although there wasn't much pavement today, we did spend a lot of time on rocks. The ascents and descents were on stone steps. The steps were often too small, making them difficult and slow to travel on. On the flat moors, the trail was paved with flat stones. These were pretty easy to walk on, but still hard on the feet. My feet are aching tonight.

Did I mention we had cool sunny weather with NO rain? Woohoo! We still had strong winds at times - probably around 25-30 mph. Today's lunch spot was next to a cairn, which we hid behind to block the wind.

Our B&B tonight is in Great Broughton, which is 2.5 miles away from the normal trail. There are no B&B's in Clay Bank Top, so anyone ending there for the day either has to get a ride to their B&B or walk there. We both like the idea of never taking a car (even though a town may not be considered on the route). So we had a challenge, as those 2.5 miles are on a busy road. Great Broughton isn't on the Harvey maps. So we tried to pick out a path to take, looking at a combination of the Harvey map and GPS. Well, we stayed on the path too long. We ended up heading west as the trail looped that way. We found some other trails that headed back, and managed to get on a northbound trail. We still ended up doing some road walking on the busy road. Ick. Cars moving very fast, and only a very narrow grass shoulder.

We made it to Great Broughton and stepped into the first pub to check out their dinner menu. We made reservations (The Bay Horse - vegan food available) and found our B&B. After a quick shower we returned to the pub to eat. After dinner we do all of our evening chores - hand washing clothes, filling water bottles, getting the maps ready for the next day, foam rolling, stretching, blogging, etc. Then into bed early!

Night: Newlands House

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