Weather: Overcast
Distance: 28.5 km
(17.7miles) Total Distance: 2740
miles
I was up early again and off to The
Wash for the second time. The storms of yesterday were past and surprisingly I
did not see any damage as I drove, but I heard that even in Coventry there had
been flooding, even further up our street where the water had come in via
someone’s back garden.
I parked outside the Bridge Hotel in
Sutton Bridge and headed off down the bank of the river. I asked in the offices of the boat yard if
there was a public footpath through the yard and was told it was as long as I kept
to the road, so off I went ignoring the mandatory hard hat signs.
The path was in a reasonable state and
even when the grass was long it was not too wet. Most of the dew had dried
off. There was little need for a map all day. I knew I just had to keep to the
path. It got pretty overgrown once I got
to the end of the River Nene and started to head west.
I soon had an air display taking place above
me to take my mind off the walking. This
was a practice bombing range and the jets were flying in every minute or
so. There was a war going on in Kosovo
at the time with NATO trying to oust the Serbs and return Kosovo to the ethnic
Albanians and it was easy to imagine what the people of Belgrade were going
through at the time. They even had a mechanism where the sound of dropping bombs
went off every lime their lasers hit the target.
As I neared the actual range I could
see red flags flying. The man who I
walked with on Tuesday had told me that the path through the range was always
open and only the marsh on the sea side of the wall counted as the range
proper.
The signs were pretty unclear as
to what one was allowed to do but I pressed on fearing that someone may come
out of the many buildings along the road at any moment and turn me back but
they never did. This may have been because
the buildings were all observation towers facing out to the marshes and in
effect I was walking behind them. The
red flags and the associated roadway went on for miles and miles. I was pretty
glad of this in a way because it meant less struggling though
undergrowth,
Eventually I reached the end that was
marked by a particularly bad overgrown half mile that took some struggling
through. I do not know whether it was a
coincidence or not but the planes stopped their practice when I entered the range
and started as soon as I came out!
The rest of the walk was again mainly
on sea defences, mainly in a reasonable state.
I walked past a nature reserve, under the pylons and up onto the road.
Fosdyke was a terrible place to
hitch. I tried for a time outside the
pub, then walked up into Fosdyke and tried again and then walked eastwards and
tried to hitch on a minor road thinking I may take the back roads. All failed
because the traffic was going so fast on the main road and there was hardly any
traffic on the minor road, only what seemed like fruit processors going home
at the end of their shift.
I went back to the pub and tried again, this time
with more luck. A Renault ‘people mover’ stopped and it was a large man who
told me his name was Mike Terry and he used to be Dorothy Squire’s pianist. I
asked him what he did for a living and he told me he was in the entertainment
business – but I knew that before he told me – you could tell by his camp
nature! I did not know much about Dorothy Squires other than the fact she was a
singer. He told me how he was on his way
to Lowestoft to do a show. He spent the
winters singing in Spain and the summers going around the seaside towns of the
UK. He was on his way down to Port
Talbot the next week to do a press conference for a forthcoming tribute show he
was doing to commemorate the death of Dorothy Squires.
I decided to go to King’s Lynn to try the Youth Hostel
there but when I got there I was told it was full but the lady did try the
hostel near Spaling for me when I asked her even though it was meant to be
closed on Thursdays. Fortunately it was
open due to demand and off I set. All in
all it took me a couple of hours to sort it out and travel between the hostels
but I think it was worth it rather than camping even though I had the camping
stuff in the boot of the car. The hostel
was fine – a house on the outskirts of a village. I met a man in the dorm who was ever so
chatty – a city planner and we discussed university campus’s. I went down to the pub in the town for tea
and had a chilli and a decent pint of beer.
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