So we pick up the adventure in Arlesford and head out for Alton, this turned out to be a longer day that I thought it would as I would decide to hike all the way from Inn to Inn on this one…
This is a quaint little town that is really neat and I did some street photos the evening before we left as the light was too good to pass up.
This is the hotel we stayed in and it was simply adorable. The whole first floor of the part you see here is a restaurant/pub and the hotel is L shaped with a significant portion out back behind this street facing portion. The rest of the town is also really neat to me as well. Like the image below of the building supply.
You can tell that they have been in this one spot for a long time. I was not able to get photos of the inside as I didnt not get out to take photos till it was well past closing time and we would be leaving in the AM before they would be open too. I kinda wished we would have planned the trip a little differently so that we could have stayed in a few of the towns an extra day to be able to explore them better…
So the next morning we leave out for the next town and make pretty good time. Alton is a larger town and we are hoping to be there by lunch, well turns out the girls decided to take public transportation after about 5 miles or so and I decided to leg it on in… this would prove to be painful.
I had looked at the map and speculated it to be about 10 miles to Alton and figured I would probably cover the remaining 5 miles in about 3 hours since I would be stopping to get photos and the erratic nature of the trail layout and such as that. Well, this turned into a 6 hour slog that added up to an additional 13 miles for the day! It even got to the point where I realized I needed to cover ground more rapidly or I would miss supper so I stopped capturing video for the YouTube channel all together and just grabbed the occasional photo instead.
Now to be fair, I did cross a lot of beautiful countryside on this leg of the trip and I don’t regret making the trek this day, but I failed to drink enough water and had debilitating cramps later that night from dehydration. The lesson here is to drink more water, especially if you are doing an activity that is physically demanding in any way.
The English countryside is some of the most picturesque terrain I have ever laid my eyes on and for the local is it just …home… I have seen a lot of beautiful places on this earth and they all have a charm. The charm here is the people and how they groom the landscape for agriculture beautifully. It is literally a post card in almost any direction you look. So I did just that, took photos in every direction, and wound up with something like 1400 unique images when I got home two weeks later.
Here we have the road crossing into Alton where you walk under the road to get into the town proper. This is the kind of things you don’t see much where I live and I found interesting. The footpaths are so important to the English that they build this kind of infrastructure to keep them operational. I wished we would have done this with the old hiking trails from our countries early settlements and made them into hiking trails today…just a thought.
The next day we really didnt do much hiking as I escorted Sierra to the airport and then went back and linked up with Teresa and we made our way by train over to Farnham. We really wanted to explore the town and Kelly had already went ahead on her own so it was the perfect opportunity. We had a great time in Farnham and found Kelly later so it all went great. Then the next day we leave Farham and make our way over to the stepping stones which is a huge deal on this trail and I didn’t even know about it till this morning.
These stepping stones are part of the trail system and when we found them we decided to make a small event of it and enjoy a few minutes at this location to make it a little more memorable. If you would like to see the stepping stones just watch the video linked above. I didn’t get my camera out of the dry bag here for obvious reasons so I only have video from this location. These kinds of treks are not just about seeing how fast you can cover ground or seeing how many miles you can hike in one day, but about stopping and smelling the flowers or grabbing some photos. This is what this pilgrimage was about for me.
