5 July - To Carlisle

There is nothing like setting yourself a challenge and walking the coast to coast seems to be something that might comfortably fit that description. However, as I now know, the challenge is not so much that you are walking from one side of the country to the other and if tired have no great flexibility to stop, but is more about the need to rely on British public transport to get you there and back: you need to start at one side of the country and end at the other and somehow find your way to and from home between them. So it's a bus to Bath, a bus to Bristol and then a bus to Carlisle before finally catching a train to St Bees in Cumbria. But the local bus to Bath doesn't have the timetable on the internet or at the (not so new) bus stops round the corner. And the non-stop bus to Bristol arrived and left from a different bay to that signed with no announcements and no one to help, and the slow local bus I was then forced to catch as a result broke down (although it did ultimately limp manfully into the station at Bristol). But eventually I was on the bus to Carlisle, although once again lateness and changes caused confusion and if it were not for a young guy I had been talking to alerting me to the unannounced arrival at a different bay I would have missed that too.