Day 9 - Braunton to Instow: 18.41 km
I genuinely do not know what is worse. The brutal climbs and descents that leave my knees filing end of life paperwork, or the unbearable heat and humidity that rolled over the coast today like one of those Old Testament plagues. Today was flat and gloriously free of soul crushing elevation which my knees celebrated enthusiastically. The rest of me, however, wanted to simply lie down in a hedge and await divine intervention because sweet merciful God it was hot. Today officially became the hottest May day ever recorded in the UK and it was absolutely savage. By noon it had reached 31 degrees and because this stage was almost entirely pavement walking, the heat rose off the road like punishment. Ancient Romans built roads to conquer continents and two thousand years later I would like to file a formal complaint. Pavement walking in extreme heat has all the romance of standing inside an air fryer while carrying a backpack and making increasingly hostile negotiations with your own nervous system. Truthfully I am not sure I can even manufacture an entertaining post because there was not much to entertain. Plenty of people out strolling and cycling. Lots of smiles, waves and cheerful hellos. Very little worthy of a photograph. I suppose I could say skip this stage entirely, but that feels wrong. The point of the SWCP is to do all of it, preferably in civilized stages like sensible British people with foresight and hotel bookings. Those of us from the go big or go home school of walking are being offered a very humbling lesson. Weather over twenty degrees on this route is not character building. It is a hostage negotiation. I kept having flashbacks to those endless exposed stretches on the Camino Portuguese leaving Lisbon where road and heat stretch on beyond reason and time itself starts behaving strangely. By the end I swear I had sweat out five pounds and all I wanted in the world was water, salt, and permission to sleep until next Thursday.
One saving grace of this stage is there is a lovely tea shop about three hours in. Right beside the river beneath actual shade and, praise be, SCONES. FINALLY. After days of longing and disappointment, I was reunited with my pastry soulmate. Under normal British conditions one has tea with a scone, but when the weather feels like Satan discovered central heating, one pivots to "fizz." Survival demands flexibility. They also served a shrimp sandwich so obscenely overfilled it looked less like lunch and more like a maritime event. Enough shrimp to feed a small battalion and enough Marie Rose sauce to relaunch the Royal Navy. Apparently the sauce became wildly popular in Britain during the 1960s when prawn cocktails ruled the culinary landscape. We spent a glorious hour and a half hiding in the shade, running our hands under ice cold tap water in the bathroom and behaving like heat stricken Victorian ladies recovering from a seaside fainting spell. There is a strange luxury in trail life where cold water on your wrists feels more decadent than champagne. Pilgrims have understood this for centuries. After enough miles, the smallest comforts become holy experiences. Then came the final ninety minute walk into Instow on a fully exposed path with not so much as a sympathetic cloud in sight. There is an option to divert onto a proper trail into town and for first timers I would absolutely recommend it. More nature. Less bike path existentialism. But by then I had reached my thermal and emotional limits and wanted to arrive at the Wayfarer Inn for a cold shower and a nap. Any opportunity to shorten the suffering became irresistible. Judging by the six other hardened walkers making the same choice, we had all reached the same conclusion. Sometimes bravery is carrying on. Sometimes wisdom is taking the shortest route to air conditioning.
Tonight we are staying at the Wayfarer Inn, a pub currently deep in the beautiful chaos of renovation. At the moment it is mostly sleeping rooms and a promise that someone materializes tomorrow morning to make breakfast. Not exactly Serena and David levels of splendor, but that was always going to be an impossible standard. Going forward I suspect there will be fewer David Hockneys on the walls and significantly fewer Flemish Masters casually hanging in bedrooms. Saying goodbye this morning was unexpectedly hard. David made us promise we would return so we could all go birdwatching on Lundy Island and then attend literary festivals together. Which is perhaps the most gloriously British invitation imaginable. Last night over dinner on the patio we were chatting about South America when Serena casually said, “Let me find photos of the eco lodge with David.” I assumed she meant their David. Imagine my surprise when the David in question turned out to be David Attenborough. Just casually. No dramatic pause. No announcement. The same way someone else might mention they once met a cousin in Birmingham. There is something both refreshing and oddly humbling about that level of understatement. History's great explorers and naturalists often seem larger than life, but perhaps the truly interesting people know fame works best when worn lightly. I admitted I had always carried this North American idea that places like Eton and Oxford produced people with the emotional warmth of expensive marble countertops. Polished and intimidating. But what I have discovered here is a charming eccentricity to old British money. If you enjoy intelligent conversation, bird watching, dogs and strange stories, you seem welcomed into the fold. Case in point, local news recently told the story of mountain bikers near Balmoral who stumbled upon Charles wandering alone in the wilderness and ended up chatting with him for thirty minutes before being invited for tea at the gamekeeper's house. Because apparently this is a country where random encounters occasionally unfold like discarded chapters from a Tolkien novel. Walking has a way of stripping away rank and status. Mud on boots is the great equalizer. Out here hospitality flows freely and people welcome one another with the ease of old friends who simply happened to lose touch somewhere around the fourteenth century.
