We’re back with EL on the Coast-to-Coast Trail in England.
EL: English pubs are great. There’s one on the Yorkshire Moors, which is very bleak and sort of endless. I remember walking for the hours and hours through kind of nothing. And then you get to the fourth-highest pub in the UK called the Lion Inn at Blakey Ridge and then you’re back in a lovely English pub having a pint or a cup of tea or whatever you want. That was lovely. And then you’re back out on the bleak moors again for a few more hours.
LA: The Moors that inspired … Um…
EL: The Bronte sisters to write their books.
LA: Exactly. So Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff and all of that darkness.
EL: Exactly. And the moors are so different to the Lake District. It’s a real contrast to the beginning of the walk, I’d say. I think I prefer the mountains and the lakes to the moors just because it is more exciting to scramble up and down and skinny-dip in lakes than walking kind of bleak nothingness for a long time.
So the Lake District, yeah, lots of ups and downs. Then when you get into Yorkshire, it kind of flattens out quite a lot more and it changes quite a bit. There’s more farms, there’s more cows, which are my nemesis. I don’t like cows.
LA: Were they a nemesis before this hike?
EL: Yeah, so I always have been, and it sounds strange that hiking is my hobby when my worst nightmare is walking through a field of cows.
LA: Well, I suppose you’ve walked and hiked many places, because I imagine, did you say you’d gone to Kilimanjaro? There aren’t many cows there.
EL: There’s not many cows and lots of people on Kilimanjaro and lots of … We had a big sort support team, so I actually felt pretty safe from the wildlife out there.
I think my best hiking stories normally come from a little bit of chaos and a little bit of fear every now and again.
LA: Go on. I’m like, “Tell me.”
EL: It’s always cow-related. On the Coast-to-Coast, I would jump over walls to avoid cows.
LA: I was hiking in the Himalayas, which is a lovely, amazing sentence to get to be able to say, over Christmas. And we got totally lost and ended up quite quickly on some farmland that we realized we weren’t supposed to be on and a dog chased us off it.
EL: [inaudible 00:12:24].
LA: Was a little unfortunate, but I imagine you maybe be crossed over into some unexpected or weird places that maybe you weren’t supposed to be on if there wasn’t signage. Did you find yourself ever just thinking, I shouldn’t have turned this corner, I shouldn’t be here?
EL: Yeah, once I tried to take a massive diversion to avoid some cows and it was kind of a choice of running across a train track, which is really dangerous and there was high fences and electric cables, or through the cows and what a choice. I went through the cows and head-
