Laundry and Travel Day - July 31st

Pretty boring day today with no pictures to share. Found a laundromat in Penrith, so we now have clean clothes to start our walk. Not sure when we’ll find another laundromat on the route, so I may be washing clothes out by hand going forward. Given how damp the weather’s been, not sure how quickly they’ll dry though.

We arrived in St. Bees @ 3:30 pm in the middle of a heavy rainstorm. Looks like we’re going to be walking in rain on muddy trails most days. So different from our Camino walks! Cindy, Judy, Pam and Gary got in @ 7:00 pm. Nice to have us all together. 

We’ve decided to start our walk tomorrow, rather than Wednesday. Our innkeeper said there’s not much to do in St. Bees other than visiting the town church and she suggested we walk @ halfway to Ennerdale (our lodging for Wednesday night). She explained where we could find a path that would bring us back to St. Bees. It adds @ 1.7 miles to each day’s walk, but breaks up the two large climbs we would otherwise have on Wednesday. All told, I think we’ll be walking @ 9 miles each day rather than 14.5 in one day, with two very long, steep climbs. The other advantage to doing it this way is that the weather tomorrow is supposed to be cloudy with light showers, whereas on Wednesday the forecast is for heavy rain in the morning tapering off a bit in the afternoon. Since we’ll be walking a shorter distance than originally planned  on Wednesday, we may be able to delay our start on Wednesday to avoid some of the rain. I’ll have an update tomorrow.

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