Things started off normally enough. We all met at the train station, got our tickets, and had to sprint to catch our train. Before sprinting, Jim and Dan got some healthy McDonalds food and some typical British beef stuffed pie thing. From the beginning, they were taking this hike VERY seriously, as evidenced by the expressions on their faces in this picture.
After avoiding the Time Out Walking group who coincidentally happened to be doing the same country walk as we were (but much more efficiently, it turns out), we got a little side tracked by this sculpture outside of Winchester Cathedral. If you text message certain words to it, it changes color. We did this both at the beginning of our walk AND at the end (sigh).
Winchester, like a lot of England, used to be occupied by the Romans and one of the major features of this walk were the watermeadows, the man made river Itchen, and the weirs that the Romans used to control the flow of the water. Once we finally got past the sculpture, we experienced idyllic scenes like this:
These sheep/rams (there was much discussion about what they actually were and Jim, despite the whiskey that he and Dan had been 'tasting' wouldn't agree with my plan for him to walk into the flock and find out. I think they were sheep. With horns.) were peacefully hanging out in what is known as "the plague pit." Yep, you guessed it: that's where they tossed the plague victims.
This peaceful scene is also where all the whining and complaining about hills and hurting legs started. We were only about three miles into the hike at this point, so you can imagine how the rest of it went.I'm not sure what it was that sparked the robot, but there you go. This was when the "how far to the pub" whining started and the first time I thought I might just ditch the guys and make my own way back.
Lucky for them, I thought they were annoying, but still endearing, even when they went running off into this field to take this picture (of a swan, in case you can't tell):
These two swans hissed at us while we were feeding them our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (I don't know why I bother making them because they always end up going to ducks and swans) and then followed us down the canal until we got to the pub.
Inside the pub, there was a picture of one of my ancesctors! (note:I got a new hairdo which will be featured in future blogs. It's shorter and slightly black...hopefully it will get a little less black with lots of shampoo!)
By this time, the whiskey was about half gone and several pints had been consumed by my companions. And this was the result:
I forced our departure before dessert, which I heard about for the rest of the walk. It's not easy having to be the tough one!
Far too early in the walk, Dan got the empty flask blues and decided that he wanted to sit and contemplate a beautiful field. Meanwhile, I contemplated leaving Dan and JIm again.
After we gazed at the field for a few minutes, someone had the brilliant idea to leave apples on the side of the trail so that passing horses (with riders) would stop and eat them. Not surprisingly, this plan really didn't work out that well. Thankfully, we came upon some horses who were all to happy to be fed. Then we tried to get a cow to eat an apple (again, not surprisingly, this didn't work, although one cow got interested in us. Dan was offended by how it didn't even NOTICE the apple we had thrown over the fence.)
Not long after this, Dan finally figured out how to use his GPS system and he and Jim spent some time running erratically in all directions to see if it would tell them they were going the wrong way (it did.) We eventually made it back into the outskirts of town.
We attempted to feed the ducks some smoked almonds, but they had a hard time with them, so it was back to peanut butter and jelly and we ate the almonds ourselves.
To top it all off, Jim and Dan completely disrespected the memory of Jane Austen by striking silly poses in front of the house in which she died. They were more respectful inside the cathedral where she is buried.
At the end of our walk we sent a bunch more text messages to the sculpture and yelled across the courtyard to each other about it and then trudged up the hill to the train station (certain members of our group complaining all the way about the hill)and made our weary way back to London. We had the muddiest feet on the tube, by far:
My tone might be exasperated, but it was a lot of fun.
