Day 22 - St. Agnes to Portreath:  17.11 km

This one's going to be short and sweet because I have absolutely nothing left in the tank. My body has filed several formal complaints and my brain is operating on fumes. The stage itself was about as exciting as unsalted porridge. Easy, uneventful, pleasantly dull. For us, that was glorious. For you,it means there is precious little drama with which to entertain.

Last night we stayed in an Airbnb run by an artist named Rosey. After the savage beating coming into Perranporth a place  btw named for Saint Piran, who discovered  tin while getting spectacularly drunk, her place felt like a lighthouse after weeks at sea. She welcomed us in and immediately delivered the greatest news imaginable. Our bag transfer pick up would not arrive until 2 p.m. the next day. No predawn panic. No military operation involving packing and breakfast schedules. We could sleep until the scandalously civilized hour of 8:30.

On Rosey’s advice, we abandoned the purist nonsense of looping back to Perranporth to resume the trail to Portreath. We’ve walked it before, and frankly, life is too short for redundancy. Besides, Ken’s knee is uined from yesterday’s violent gales. If you ever need proof of how masochistic it is to fight British coastal weather, look at Ken: normally a specimen ten times fitter than me, now hobbling around like a geriatric sailor looking for his lost youth. Today was short, sweet, and entirely devoid of cognitive and physical strain. Just the way a broken man likes it.

The crown jewel of this stage is a lone, defiant cafe clinging to the rocks of Chapel Porth. There is nothing else, just the Atlantic roaring against the cliffs and a kitchen churning out gourmet sandwiches on house-baked grain bread. But let’s not bullshit each other: you come here for the Hedgehog. You need this ice cream before the lights go out for good. It is a waffle cone cradling rich, golden Cornish ice cream, buried under a decadent avalanche of local clotted cream, and  rolled in shattered, honey-roasted hazelnuts. It is a beautiful, filthy masterpiece of pure, unadulterated gluttony. Frankly, it is better than any sex you have ever had. If forced to choose between this cone and world peace, I would have to think about it for a dangerously long time. I would step into a MMA octagon and fight to the death for this ice cream. I would win, too, because desiremakes monsters of us all and I would show absolutely no mercy for that cream.

A few kilometers down the trail, reality reasserted itself with a vengeance and another cafe. No gastronomic miracles here, just a fish-finger burger and chips. The fries were decent but the burger was a profound culinary crime. It consisted of three massive, leathery fish sticks drowning in enough tartar sauce to float the Royal Navy and mask the stale sadness of the catch.  Skip it entirely, save your money, and keep your soul pure for the Hedgehog.

There are abandoned tin mines scattered across this stretch of coast like bones of old giants. Poldark was filmed around here, which explains why every cliff seems contractually obligated to look ruggedly handsome. Cornwall’s tin once helped power the Industrial Revolution, though today the mines mostly provide dramatic scenery and excellent opportunities to daydream. Not a lot else to report. Ken is icing his knee like a prizefighter between rounds. I am currently too lazy to travel the arduous twenty feet across the room to put the kettle on. This may be the greatest challenge of the day.

We did score a caffeine fix. The local Cost Cutters had canned Starbucks espresso marked down to 50p. One of the unexpected perks of being in a country where coffee feels like an afterthought is that North American coffee products end up languishing on discount shelves like wallflowers at a village dance. I know the Australians will rise from the shadows to rebuke me for mentioning Starbucks. That's fine. Put them on this trail for a few weeks and let them stumble upon a 50p can of espresso. They will clutch it to their chest like a Victorian lover reunited at the docks. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and sometimes salvation arrives in an aluminium can.