27th September 03

The accommodation earns an 8/10, losing marks for not having en-suite.

The knee is bothering me so I put a crepe bandage on and take some painkillers. I have now developed toothache, is my body trying to tell me something, I shall ignore it and try and convince myself that I can apply “mind over matter”.

We proceed on our way at about 9-00am and soon find many walkers doing the full walk; they have come from Lincoln, London, Edinburgh, York, and 2 teenagers camping from Derby.

As we walk on we see that behind us two people are in bright coloured clothes, it turns out they are dressed as roman soldiers and running the full wall walk in 2 days, they stop for a rest and a chat.

They are doing it for a Sunderland Hospital Charity in memory of one of their mothers. It is arduous enough just walking never mind running, especially as one of the guys does not have the build of a long distance runner, it turns out however that he has already done the New York marathon, but running up and down stepped inclines is much harder than running on level tarmac. We wish them the best of luck and they go on their way. When they are out of sight I think, that would have been a good photograph taken with roman soldiers but what do we see after a short while, the roman soldiers having a break at their support vehicle, so I offered to make a donation to their charity if we could have a group photograph and they obliged. Fig 3

Figure 3 – The day we met the Romans

We are now seeing much more of the Wall together with Turrets and Milecastles, at the beginning of the day someone said to us they were sick of seeing the wall, I now understand what they meant.

Today’s walk is supposedly 12 miles but as there are so many hills it will be more like 15 miles, it certainly feels like it, as we are grateful to see our next accommodation in the distance, a bright white building called The Twice Brewed Inn.

As we walk down the road from the Wall to our accommodation, some Army Cadets approach us and said “du yuz na where wuz arz”, if we had not both been born and bred on Tyneside we would not have been able to understand them, they said they had walked 6 miles and looked as if they had walked 20 miles, they got no sympathy from “uz” as we had just done 15 miles. Our route had measured 12 miles on the map but this does not take into account the additional distance of an incline, for example, 10 metres on a map up a hill of 45 degrees is actually 14 metres travelled, so our 12 miles may well be 15 miles travelled, plus the energy required to climb these hills, it is not surprising that we feel our legs are not now connected to our bodies or our brains. Brian reminds me that I am doing this for pleasure. We console ourselves by the fact that we are now at half distance. This has been the most exhaustive day yet, Brian says it is the most tiring day he has ever had, I am feeling the same, after 6 tablets, a very painful leg below the knee, toothache, one blister and totally exhausted, we eventually reach our resting place. Entering the pub, the music is loud, the smoke is dense and the barman is singing, just when we need a bit of peace and quite. He asks me to sign in and I find that my hand will not follow instructions given from my brain, my body is failing me, but nothing that a good nights sleep will not put right. It’s not exactly 3 star, more like 1 star, our tiny bedroom is above the bar where music is being played continuously, the shower and toilet are of a very poor standard, but in our condition we look forward to a good meal and a nice pint of beer. A previous walker had said that the beer was good; I think she meant that was all that was good. We come down for a meal but as the bar is like a disco, we retire to the back room for our meal, things do not improve, but the beer is good. We notice many people in fancy dress and find out that the local Young Farmers are having a fancy dress “do” with a live band. As we are joined in the back room by a party of Americans on holiday, we feel embarrassed by the standard of food; they must think we are a peculiar lot when they see the Young Farmers. I walk into their private room to see what is going on and come across a young lady, who was obviously at the front of the queue when they were handing out the breasts, wearing a tee shirt emblazoned on the front with the inscription  

I WISH I

HAD THESE

FOR BRAINS

We retire to bed with those thoughts, but unable to sleep due to music from the bar, music from the live band at the Young Farmers night out, traffic whizzing past 8 foot from our bedroom window at 60 mph. Not until 11-30pm does it go quite after the bar closes, every one has said goodnight and slammed car doors. It is however Saturday night so we could hardly complain; imagine going downstairs in your pyjamas and asking them to turn the music down.

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