WALKING THE COTSWOLD WAY - AND DRIVING. PART THREE.

Wednesday July 1st was the hottest day in England since the scorching summer of 1976. I remember that summer, spending it in Surrey! Tove decided to take a day off from walking - the stretch from Painswick to Uley measures 24 kilometres, and frankly it would have been very strenuous. I asked her if she wanted to take the bus into Cheltenham with me, as I was going back to my famous osteopath Mark Lester for some more treatment, but she decided to take it easy. I managed to get some shopping done at the sales in Cheltenham - doing my new version of walking the Cotswold Way: Following the worn trail between the clothes stores on the main street.

Meeting up later at the Old Crown Inn in Uley, a 17th century coaching inn with an incredible location - rolling green hills and pastures wherever you turned your eyes - we sat in the shade of the big umbrellas at the Inn terrace. The dogs were cooled down with water and seemed very pleased.

Bull in field

But England is known for quick weather changes, and the following day - my wedding day - the clouds hung heavy over the trail. The trail, you may ask - did I venture out again? Yes, I sure did, deciding to at the last minute and pulling my hiking stuff out of my suitcase before it was collected. The bus for our next destination Wotton-under-Edge, left from a town called Dursley, which I thought I could walk to easily, and besides I felt more mobile after my treatments the previous day.

But I'd forgotten to pull my raincoat out of the suitcase - what a stupid thing to do in England when the sky looks like the above.

Tove

It turned out Dursley was not just around the corner, and of course the 6 kilometres that I walked left my knee swollen and sore again. But Dursley's unexpectedly trendy coffee shop the Bank Café - in yes, an old bank - literally shouted our names and lured us in, and how fantastic it was to sit there for an hour at the old school desk and dry up.

Tove went on her way and I walked around Dursley trying to discover either bus services to Wotton-on-Edge, or taxis, but no luck. The bus connections between these small villages are not always brilliant and the information poor, so basically you have to ask people in the street. Suddenly Tove returned - with a man no less, who had been walking from the opposite direction, and he persuaded her to turn back because the trail had become very wet and muddy with the rain. And we succeeded in catching one of two daily bus routes to Wotton and yet another 17th century coaching inn - the Swan Hotel!

 

Wotton-under-Edge is a very pretty village, with a high sense of community spirit amongst its inhabitants, which was something you could feel straight away. Well, actually one bakery took it a bit far perhaps, by proclaiming in its shop window a text that went something like this: "You say you want small speciality shops, but you can't just say it, you've got to use them too!"

The beautiful weather returned and I installed myself in a rose garden while again Tove walked away on the Cotswold trail. My knee was very swollen from the previous day's walking and it was absolute bliss to sit in the shade with my leg up and my coffee and book within reach.

I called the local taxi service after a few hours, because Tove wanted to be picked up in a village on the way, and before I knew it I found myself in a white van with the friendliest taxi driver I've ever come across - Kathy! She turned out to be an excellent guide as well and told us vivid stories about life in these parts of the Cotswolds. We drove past an idyllic looking farm and she pointed - "That's where the Backhouse murder took place in the 80s!" What a horrible story it was, and she knew most of the gory details, having lived in the village and gone to school with one of the sons of the involved! She was driving us to Chipping Sodbury, via both Little Sodbury and Old Sodbury, and I couldn't help associating it all with the TV-series Midsomer Murders, where quaint old English villages - all having "Midsomer" as part of their names - are infested by the most gruesome murders committed by otherwise normal and sane looking locals.

Ballroom size bedroom at the Whiteways B&B

Kathy's colleague - who looked as if he was a member of ZZ Top - drove me to our second final destination on Saturday July 4th. It was called Cold Ashton on the itinerary, but no - it was actually a tiny place called Nimlet. The front of the Bed and Breakfast looked out on the busy, noisy A46, but the back - where our room was - looked out on the most splendid rural England. A bit Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-ish.

Kathy's long-haired taxi colleague was also a bit of a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - a mixture of irritated and caring, shouting at wobbly cyclists on narrow country lanes one moment and worrying about dropping Tove off on the trail alone the next. Leaving me at the seemingly deserted B&B bothered him seriously, especially when I asked him if there was anywhere I could go and have lunch. "Oh no, there's nothing around here," he fretted, "you're in the sticks now, darlin'."

Sheep and Land Rover in field - how rural can you get?

But Linda the landlady and her friend Jo magically appeared from the beautiful huge bedroom which they had prepared, took one look at my knee and decided that Jo would do lymphatic drainage on me at her house in the afternoon. In the meantime I watched the tennis on TV.

So - lymph drained and bandaged I waited for Tove, who arrived at Whiteways after her last stretch of walking the Cotswold Way. WELL DONE! One of us walking, the other one driving - well, walking a little. It was time for a small celebration, and we were taken to dinner by Tove's childhood friend Andy and his lovely wife Susie. So we weren't completely in the sticks after all, because this was a gourmet pub with the most delicious food. Thank you, generous and open-minded Andy and Susie. We had such a great time, and you became my friends as well!

Phil the B&B landlord joined the long row of welcoming people we had met during the past eleven days and offered to drive us to the nearest commuter bus station so that we could get to Bath on our final day. At breakfast we talked with an elderly couple from New Zealand, who became more and more talkative as the meal proceeded. At first they had seemed very reserved, but at the end I nearly couldn't get away. I knew Phil was waiting outside in his car, eager to get going, but unfortunately I had told the NZ couple that I'd been both there and in Australia and that my daughter lived in Melbourne. "Will you be visiting her?" the wife asked. "Definitely," I replied, trying to wrap up the conversation with one-word answers. "The flies!" she shouted, "The flies! They are everywhere in Melbourne! They're awful!"

As I entered Phil's car I could hear her voice behind me: "Beware of the flies!" Hmm… Is Melbourne the natural location for horror movies, I wonder? I haven't got that impression from my daughter Julie.

Bath Abbey

The Royal Crescent, Bath

The Bamboo Room at Marlborough House, Bath

Beautiful and intriguing Bath was our final destination, and what a fabulous day we had. Hop-on, hop-off buses, shopping, pubs, sightseeing - Bath is so well worth visiting, totally homogeneous with every house and building constructed in the grey Bath stone, well, at least I couldn't spot any other building material anywhere.

Strangely enough neither of us slept very well that last night in the beautiful Bamboo Room at Marlborough House, just down the road from the Royal Crescent. This was a change from all the previous ten nights, when we had both fallen asleep before our heads hit the pillow.

Perhaps it was the thought of a long travelling day back to Norway, perhaps the knowledge that a wonderful and special holiday was over. I think Tove must simply have been over-exhausted, with her fantastic effort of completing the Cotswold Way.

For me it was a holiday with very few associations to my life with my husband, which was good. I have never been on this sort of travel together with him, in fact not many times in England with him at all, so it was an experience just for me. And I knew that if he had been alive he would never have begrudged me this trip with one of my best friends - on the contrary he would have been so happy on my behalf. He might have asked if it was a wise idea to go hiking with a wounded knee though.

Which of course it wasn't. But the Cotswolds welcomed me anyway, hiking or not.