Early on April 16, I will leave the comfortable confines of The Old Croft House B&B in Kirkby Stephen and set out on my solo journey to the North Sea, some 110 miles away. In the late summer of 2023, my brother and I walked the entire width of England along the popular Coast to Coast Path. It was an enormous undertaking that had us crossing mountain tops and seemingly endless hills and valleys to travel the entire width of England from the Irish Sea to the North Sea entirely on foot. And it was, for me, the experience of a lifetime which was initially pursued as a palliative after a personal setback but finished to demonstrate to myself and the world that I could!
During that trek I had been particularly enamored of the countryside of the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors National Parks that made up the eastern two-thirds of the walk. Based on that alone and flush with an income tax refund last Fall, I logged into my account at MACS Adventures and booked and paid for a return to that portion of the Coast to Coast. Immediately after that I bought my flights with Aer Lingus and reserved a room in a hotel at Manchester Airport for the night before my return flight. I have purchased train tickets to get me to the starting line in Kirkby Stephen. In addition to all these travel arrangements, I bought an Insta360X4 adventure camera with the notion that I would supplement the blog of this journey with daily video clips.
With all of this preparation having been done, a nagging question remained: Why am I doing this? Besides the affinity I felt for this part of England and my enjoyment of walking as a pastime, I really could not articulate a good reason to leave my seaside home for two weeks in April to tread, on my own, 110 miles across a foreign land. So, in recent days I have pondered this question.
Answers are beginning to take shape. The first of these might be summed up by another, shorter question: Why not? There is nothing written that our daily lives must be organized around familiar routines. Of course there’s a comfort in the familiar but comfort and familiarity rarely promote growth. Eating the same food and seeing the same people day in and day out do little to expand horizons.
A second reason to do this may be simply that it will be a source of excitement and adventure of heading into such an escapade entirely on my own. I’ll be going through territory that is somewhat familiar because I’ve been there before. But I expect that the solitary nature of this trip will deliver these places in an entirely new light. There will be the variables that nature provides. The weather will determine the clothing I wear each day and will dictate the character of the terrain I walk upon. Will I be traipsing through bog and mud or skipping over dusty pathways? Will I be looking out at endless vistas from the tops of the moors or staring into a mist that limits my world to the few yards on all sides of me? Will I be chilled to the bone or sweating profusely? Other unknowns will present as the people I encounter along the way. Will I pick up with companions along the trail or walk mile after mile in complete solitude? Will evening meals be shared with others or will I be seated alone in the most remote corner of the pub? And what will I do if a person I meet is completely insufferable? And then there is the paradoxical thrill of knowing that I might succumb to an injury or illness on my own in a far-away place. None of this is felt as concern nor as a disincentive. Quite the contrary, the unknowns, even the risks, are incentives – reasons to do this thing.
A third reason that I have stated elsewhere and in other settings is that, despite my advancing age (I’m 76) I am still able to do this thing. I’m not out to prove anything. I have absolute confidence that my body is still up for a challenge of this magnitude. Rather, the idea is that one should take full advantage of the gifts that one is given by whatever powers are charged by the universe to give to some of us but to deny to others. In a sense, therefore, I’m referring here to a kind of responsibility that I feel to do the things I can do while I still can do them.
And yet one more reason for the trip entered my thinking lately. That is to use the effort to raise awareness and perhaps some money for a favored charity. I have identified an object for my benefaction and will be ready soon to announce it here. So stay tuned.