Coast to Coast 2009 – Itinerary

I know I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, but that was several months ago and I don’t suppose anyone remembers that now (even those that read it), but this year’s C2C is going to be a little different to the usual St. Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay walk.

For one thing, I have a walking companion for the first time. Tex, who should have been with me in 2006, but had to drop out due to other commitments, is accompanying me this year. In fact I wouldn’t be doing the C2C again if it wasn’t for him. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the walk last time; indeed quite the opposite, but I just didn’t expect to be coming back to it again so soon – after all there are so many long distance paths in the UK that I want to complete.

Secondly, we both decided that just walking from one side of England to the other wasn’t enough of a challenge for us, we wanted to do something a little bit different. I remember feeling at the end of the walk last time, as I sat enjoying a beer in the Bay Hotel in Robin Hood’s Bay, that I wanted to turn round and walk all the way back to the beginning. Well obviously, as working people, neither of us could afford the holidays to do that, but we did the next best thing.

For a couple of years we’ve wanted to do the Lyke Wake Walk, a 40 mile challenge walk across the North Yorks Moors from Flyingdales to Osmotherly. As it happens, the start of this walk is only 3 miles from Robin Hood’s Bay. The decision was easy… our extra challenge was to add the Lyke Wake Walk to the end of the C2C, thus allowing us to get to the end of the walk and then turn round and do at least some of it in the other direction.

Madness perhaps – but what better training could you ask for than walking 190 miles in 11 days, before setting out on a 40 mile challenge walk?

The itinerary had to be juggled a little bit, as we still only wanted to take 12 days doing the walk, due mainly to the number of days leave we would have to take from work. Here’s what we came up with…

This is a fairly standard start to the walk, at least up to Keld. From there I chose to avoid Reeth, which I had not enjoyed last time round and save a day by pushing straight on to Richmond. From there I wanted to make a few miles up for a couple of days to leave a short last day into Robin Hood’s Bay – allowing us an afternoon off to rest up for the big walk the following day.

My brother has agreed to support us along the Lyke Wake route, he will meet us at selected points along the route and have the kettle boiling for a hot brew and cuppa soup – this is a big help as it allows us to keep our pack weights to an absolute minimum, as we won’t need to carry that much food and water – just enough to be safe.