Weather: Cold
Distance: 21 km ( 13 miles) Total Distance: 1937.6 miles
I had breakfast with the Richards’s
themselves. Mike thanked me because it
was only when guests were staying did he have a cooked breakfast. Glad to be of service Mike!
It was a finer day weather-wise than yesterday though
it was still cold and windy. Since it
was so early, I managed to find a place to park on one of the side roads very
easily - it was just a case of deciding which road would be safe. Most of the day's walk seemed to be along
concrete of one sort or another, much of it promenade. The wind and wearing a
tight hat was giving me a headache, so I stopped and took a couple of
paracetamol. Perhaps the most
pleasurable bit was between Lancing and Shoreham where the path left the road
and there was a series of lakes on the inside of the path and the sea on the outside.
At Shoreham-by-Sea the path disappeared and
it was a case of walking on the suburban streets - the advantage being that it
was out of the cold head wind. I walked
as far as I could along this little peninsular before turning the corner and
heading back - swapping housing for light industrial units.
I was lucky to find the footbridge took
me back to the mainland, as it were, and then along the busy and narrow main road
of what I presume was Shoreham itself past B&Q, car garages and other less
than interesting places. An even more
lucky break was the pontoon type bridge back towards the sea, again saving me
what would have been a long detour around the port. There were hundreds of purple ribbons tied to
a chain fence in the town - a sign of the battle to stop veal calf exports to
the continent that had been fought and I think won the previous winter.
This was real industrial dockland
stuff now, and what looked to be a disused power station. Near the harbor entry a number of fishermen huddled in a cafe but it did not look very
appealing so I took to the concrete again towards Hove. Once off the docks and onto the promenade
again, I stopped in a cafe - a rather ramshackle type building on the middle of
a green patch just back from the shore.
It was hard to believe but it seemed people were actually coming in for
their Sunday lunch.
Eventually, through the poor
visibility, the piers of Brighton appeared. The West Pier was a weird site,
now derelict and not joined to the beach and obviously visited by graffiti
artists periodically. It was strange because the seafront itself was well kept
and lots of expensive hotels overlooked this sight.
The Palace Pier was in much better
condition and even in the middle of winter doing good business. I stopped here,
well in fact went on a bit to find a bus stop, but ended up doing a little
figure of eight and catching the bus on the road perpendicular to the pier. Once back I at cat I drove home to Coventry after a windswept weekend away!
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