Weather: Overcast
Distance: 17.5 km (10.9
miles) Total Distance:
2629 miles
Our
room in the Youth Hostel was boiling hot and I woke sweating conkers in the
middle of the night. I thought at one
stage I was ill and would not be able to walk but was just fine in the morning. I got up at 7 o’clock, made myself two cups
of tea and had some cereal before heading off leaving my wife to pack up the
car. She didn't mind (he said confidently and not too loud).
I was
going to keep to the promenade on leaving Great Yarmouth but across the dunes I
saw a jogger making good headway on the beach and decided that the sand must be
firm enough so headed off down to the shoreline.
I saw
little of Caister because I was down on the shore. Margaret had told me that there was little to
see in Caister anyway so I did not mind missing it – in fact I was quite glad to be
hidden from it. I'm sure the residents of Caister would have something to say about that.
I
wondered at one stage if there was a cliff-top path so just short of California
I came up off the beach but was I only a few yards along when I appeared to enter
a camp site. I made use their toilets
(blocked!) and then tried to make my way along the cliff top but there was a
locked gate blocking my way. I climbed
over it and hurt my ankle in jumping off it. Fortunately the going got better as the
day wore on rather then worse. I headed
back onto the beach. It was obvious that
if there had ever been a cliff top path it had now collapsed into the sea. Many of the houses in the village looked as
if they were about to follow the same end.
I
stopped for a break at Winterton-on-Sea.
I was just ordering my eccles cake and mug of coffee (£1.50) when a man
with a Great Dane came in, soon followed by a woman and a Great Dane – I felt
quite out of place not having a big dog.
I had
hoped from looking at the map that there would be a path of some sort from
Winterton-on-Sea to the end but instead it was a large sea defense which the
dunes had all but obliterated and it was therefore simpler to keep to the firm
sand just above the tide line. This
section was the highlight of the walk as I kept seeing seals, some very close up
– only a matter of some 20 feet away. Their sad faces looking curiously at me.
I came across two seals playing on the sand climbing over each other and
putting their flippers around each other. Very cute.
There
were no landmarks to be seen from the beach and I was afraid I would overshoot
the place where I had arranged to meet the family. I had worked it out when I stopped for coffee
that it would take about an hour and twenty minutes to get to the end so after
an hour I walked through a gap in the dunes but found no sign of
civilisation. I carried on and then a
quarter of an hour later I came onto the dunes again and found myself just
short of Warren Farm.
I
found Warren Farm where there was supposed to be public parking but it turned out
that it was a private caravan site which was closed. My bowls had obviously thought that there
would be public conveniences there as marked on the map but there were
not. Instead I was forced to use a nearby patch of
reeds, disturbing a couple of grouse in doing so. At one with nature.
As soon as I realised that
Margaret was nowhere to be seen I walked up to the road and back to a National
Trust car park some quarter of a mile south where I had seen cars pulling in
even though it was not on the map. When
I checked in there I could still not find Margaret and the car and headed back
to where we had arranged to meet. As I
was heading out of the car park I saw the Margaret pull into Warren Farm in the
distance. By the time I reached the
farm, Margaret and the boys had headed off to the beach in search of me. We soon met up and all was well.
Margaret
had been off exploring some of the villages on the Broads such as Hoverton and
Honiton. Sean and Margaret had a new
pair of sunglasses and Gareth a set of posters to colour in.
We had
a go at calling into Norwich but parking was not easy to find so we headed back
out and had a McDonalds on the ring road instead. We
called into see friends in Hessington on the way home.
Got
held up in Bank-holiday traffic on the way back to Coventry. Gave up with the A11 queues just past
Thetford and took to the back roads and came across some very pretty
villages. Joined the A14 at Huntingdon
and stopped to buy some sandwiches etc at a Shell petrol station. Eventually got home at about half past
nine. Gareth stayed awake talking most
of the time and was shattered by the time he got home.
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