February 2026
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There’s a wonderful scene in the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” set in a medieval village at the height (or depths) of a terrible plague. The setting is a muddy and excrement-strewn village whose sickly denizens are crawling, coughing and rooting in the muck. Eric Idle plays a character who is walking alongside a wooden cart laden with dead bodies. He is clanging a triangle and calling on people to “Bring out your dead!” One resident, played by Terry Jones, emerges from his hovel with an elderly man slung over his shoulder. As he moves to dump the man on top of the body pile, the old man protests that “I’m not dead!” To which Jones replies “You’re old. You will be soon enough.” Idle, playing the obedient civil servant, objects that he cannot take the man because he’s not dead and that “it’s against regulations.” The old man continues to protest saying, among other things “I think I’ll go for a walk!!” The scene doesn’t end well for the old man when Idle, in exchange for a small bribe, clubs him and his limp body is added to the pile.
Like the man in the Monty Python scene, I think I’ll go for a walk. Also like that man, I am old – at least by most standards. My next birthday will be my 77th and the actuaries are betting that there won’t be many after that. Too many of my cohort, born in the middle of the last century, are already dead. Many more are infirm and others have given up the ghost while they sit and wait for the grim reaper. I feel very fortunate that many of the ills that routinely befall men of my age have not yet come my way.
With these blessings, I have vowed to live as fully as I possibly can for as long as I possibly can realizing full well that the day will inevitably arrive when my body begins to fail me. I continue my habit of walking four or five miles each day. Lately I have visited the YMCA frequently to maintain whatever strength my aging muscles will allow. And I have quit drinking alcohol.
Now I have a plan to fulfill the above-stated desire to go for a walk. On April 14, I will board an Aer Lingus plane in Boston which will bring me to Dublin and then on to Manchester UK. From there, I will hop on a train which will transport me to the village of Kirkby Stephen in Eastern Cumbria. On the morning of April 16 (my father’s 116th birthday) I will begin to trek on foot to Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire on the coast of the North Sea about 110 miles away. These place names will sound familiar to those of you who followed my adventures of 2022-23 when my brother and I undertook to walk across the waist of England along the Coast to Coast Path. This year’s walk is, in fact, the eastern portion of that same path.
As some of you know, I posted a daily chronicle of the earlier walk in my “Coast to Coast Blog” accessed through this link. I will reprise that effort on this trip and I hope to include snippets of video from each day’s journey. So please join me as I walk through the fields, river valleys and hills of Cumbria and North Yorkshire. About two months to go!