It doesn’t look great and the cars do go at some speed along there. Is there a footpath running North from that point?
Typical of visitors, choosing that bloody poncy restaurant over Barrow’s finest kebab house!
Madness, wave as you pass Spalding. 
Are you quite mad? 
There’s enough smashes on that road already without you adding to the carnage…
Sadly not. I’ll have to hack west along the verge for 500m or so (assuming I get across in one piece) and then turn up Utton’s Drove. Fortunately the verge is quite wide. The people who wrote the trail guidebook did actually manage this route a decade or so ago but were so traumatised by it that they recommend taking the Boxworth to Swavesey road a kilometre further west. That has no pavement though, and is busy enough to be ‘uncomfortable’. So the choice is between a short length of very scary or a couple of miles of a bit worrying.
The A14 cars are indeed quick but I’m more worried by the truckers sleeping their way from Lowestoft to the midlands.
VB
Why are you sitting on the roof when there is a perfectly nice beach and what looks like decent boozing facilities below you? 
Silly Strayans…
Have an adequate holiday.
Two Albanian guys will have sold him a cut price hang-gliding experience.
Have a great time Terry !
VB
Get yourself along to Lobster Road.
http://www.seabreezefishnchips.co.uk/
I’d recommend the Haddock. 
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Dinner location is already taken care of. While the exact establishment is not, it will be somewhere along here…
Redcar?
** shameless theft of Guys’ one liner**
Fuck … I’ve just clicked his link.
You have to be on your game in this place or have some original material.
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After Lopwell, a few days camping at Higher Rew. Walks round Bolt Head and a pleasant (commercial) kayak trip from Salcombe towards Prawle Point.
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On holiday in Wales with my sister, mum and two dogs. Lovely cottage near the coast but nearly killed myself and my dog trying to get down to the secret cove (Traeth Bach beach) near our cottage yesterday.
In the end we got about 10 ft from the beach but it was then a sheer slope of craggy granite, and while I could have carefully eased myself down on my backside my dog wasn’t looking very keen, and if she slipped and got injured we would have been totally stranded with no way back and no means of communication.
I’m still determined to have another go before the weeks out.
Our problem now is that the brand new Kia Sorrento we have borrowed for the week won’t start - something wrong with the keyless start procedure. What’s wrong with just having a bloody key!!
Now we are going to have to see if we can get Kia to send someone out to the middle of nowhere on a Sunday.
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small change of plan - friends in Shrewsbury have bailed on us, so we are now coming back from Cartmel to home, then to S.Wales - it enables us to ditch some of the heavier luggage for the flight to Isles of Scilly and Louise wanted a chance to check up on the cats…
Sleeper train from London
Inverness 1 night and collect hire car
Fort William - 2 nights
Oban - 2 nights
Loch Lomond - 2 nights
Carlisle - drop hire car and board train
Settle - 1 night
Cartmel - 2 nights
Home 1 night
Penarth - 2 nights
Exeter - 1 night
Isles of Scilly - actually staying on Bryher - 4 nights
Exeter - 1 night
home
You’ll find that there are boats running to the other islands & I’d certainly recommend time spent on St Martins; beautiful deserted beaches & St Agnes/Gugh if you can get the relevant rides. Personally, I wouldn’t bother with St Marys. It has cars & feels like the mainland whereas the other islands don’t. Tresco is pretty, the Abbey gardens & figurehead museum are worth a look but it does feel like something of a show/display island & not quite natural somehow.
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thank you - exactly what we intend to do. We had a good day on St Mary’s last year, we do intend to see some of the other Islands.
St Agnes will always remain my favourite, where are you eating in Exeter?
hadn’t decided yet… any recommendations?
Oh well. You win some and you lose some I guess.
The good news: I got across the A14 on Friday without becoming an accident statistic. It was tougher than I’d hoped. What I didn’t know was that there are roadworks there, so both carriageways currently have 40mph limits on them. At 40mph you still need a reasonably long gap between the vehicles to get across a lane of traffic at a run. Each carriageway of the A14 has two lanes, so you actually need a pair of slightly offset gaps. The speed limit, however, scrunches the traffic up, so these gap pairs are rare and they really only occur in front of artics. So when you start your run you’re well aware that the approaching vehicle a) stands zero chance of slowing significantly and b) will certainly kill you if you haven’t managed to get out of its way. Ho hum. I scored two out of two and didn’t seem to scare the artic drivers either.
The bad news. This walk was unusual in that Day 2 was always going to be harder than Day 1. I knew that the distance was longer and that towards the end there would be very few people around to offer any kind of help. As the date approached it also became clear that the weather was going to be hotter. So I really needed to be in pretty good shape at the end of Day 1. Most of me was. But here’s the underside of my right foot (photo taken in a mirror, so it looks like my left).
That was game over. The blood blister on toe 4 was manageable and the detaching callouses behind toes 4 and 5 and on the outside of the heel while tender were bearable too. But the large and partially torn and raw blister wasn’t.
Most of the cause was either no-one’s fault (weather too hot) or mine (boots too watertight to release the sweat, so the sole skin softens and delaminates). Some of it though was down to a landowner who put me through a scarily bad experience north of Chatteris. He’s got it coming over in the cockpunching thread.
To sum up - I did complete the Day 1 leg (including walking three to four miles, mostly on tarmac, on that foot after it tore open). On Day 2 Mrs VB came and rescued me and we drove over to Sodders and Sam’s and sat in their garden drinking cold beer, nibbling on tasty snacks, chatting and playing with the dogs. Which was an absolute joy. Yesterday we had a wander round King’s Lynn, which was nice enough. Today we dropped in on my family in Boston then drove home. I’ve got one of my regular appointments with the podiatry ladies on Thursday by which time the damage should be dead enough for them to tidy up. Could’ve been worse 
.
VB
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