Day 59
Llanthony Priory to Hay on Wye: 14 miles
Dedication of the Day: Samuel L. Jackson
Reason: I ended my day watching Die Hard With a Vengeance. You know, as one does.
I woke up after not sleeping well because my legs had been on fire, to my legs being less on fire. There will still patches of problems, but it wasn't the problem it had been the night before. So I wandered downstairs to have my 12th century priory breakfast (I don't think the food was that old, but the priory still was), packed up my stuff and quickly headed off.
First things first, I was quickly caught in taking yet another photo storm of pictures of the priory, due to the fact that there was no fog left, some blue sky, and I could even see the hills in the Valley all around me. After that, I went back to the trail to climb onto the Haterall Ridge for the second time in two days. Although it took me a while to get back up - it didn't seem as far now that I was actually able to see where I was going.
When I got to the top, the views were lovely. Flat rolling English countryside to the east, and dark mountains of the Black Mountains/Brecons Beacons national park to my north and west. Wild horses scattered about. Looked like it was going to be a lovely day. Except for one thing - it was cold. And not just cold for July. Actively cold, like winter cold, under a bank of grey clouds.
Having ditched the vast majority of my stuff when I started Offa's Dyke, I didn't really have much choice of clothing, just how I layered it. I had my three quarter length running leggings, a t-shirt, a zip up hoodie sweatshirt, and a thin rainproof jacket. Even after putting all these on including putting up all the hoods - still cold. And as I climbed higher and higher (the several mile long mountain ridge would eventually hit 800 meters/2300 ft at the Black Mountain) it unsurprisingly got colder and colder.
On the plus side, this meant I was walking pretty fast, just to try to keep warm. On the minus side, I was starting to not be able to feel my fingers. Alternating walking stick hands, I started to cover my hands with my sweatshirt to maintain the feeling in them. After about two hours I started to wonder whether I shouldn't consider taking an escape route off the mountain - with higher heights and colder temperatures to come, it would get worse before it got better.
Right around that point, the sun decided to make an appearance. That reminded me very quickly how suddenly the weather here can change in an instant. It went from being absolutely freezing, to pleasant, if not hot, in the matter of a few minutes.
But, the rain
This proved to be even more the case when suddenly I noticed a darker cloud on the horizon. It looked like it was on the Hay-on-Wye end of the ridge, heading east. Just as I hit the high point of the ridge and started descending toward the flatter hillsides near Hay, suddenly the skies opened up and the rain I'd seen on the horizon poured out on me. Seeing as there was no shelter, I just continued on and luckily it passed quickly.
Then, everything was bright again. Except, sigh, one more giant cloud on the horizon that you could see was dropping huge amounts of rain on the countryside under it. I tried to gauge which direction the raincloud was headed, decided it was headed toward me, and thought for some reason if I just went really, really, really fast, I could run out of it's path.
And that's how I found myself sitting in a giant ditch that used to be an ancient fort trying to use one of the walls as shelter as an absolutely tropical amount of rain fell from the sky. Sighing that the other thing P had forgotten to bring when he left all my bags at home was the cover for my backpack, I hoped the dry bags in there were working.
It cleared up, and was a beautiful day again, until, guess what, 45 minutes later once again I found myself being absolutely pounded by rain - though this time I found shelter under trees that kept me relatively dry for a while. Finally I began to understand what the symbol the weather forecasters use in the UK all the time meant - a cloud, a rain drop AND the sun? Ah, that means scattered showers and scattered sunshine.
When I finally got to Hay-on-Wye it had taken me much longer to get there than expected, due to all the hiding from the rain. Also I was wet, and really in no mood to look around - despite having loved it when I was here last year. So I called the hostel outside town I'd found through AirBnB and asked them to come get me in town (as they'd offered when I booked).
When I got there - I was the only person in the place. Given that the owner had just built it last year, and it had really nice kitchen and living room facilities, I was quite a happy camper. When I told my host I appreciated that he had all 5 Die Hards so I could set about watching those - he pointed outside and said 'you know it's lovely out, you could also sit outside' to which I nodded, and inside reminded myself that he probably wasn't thinking about the fact that I've spent nearly two months straight outside, and right now it's the inside that's the luxury.
So I contented myself to an evening of Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson in Die Hard with a Vengeance, followed up by what I know consider to be a Welsh documentary film, the outerspace physics movie Interstellar with Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway. Why a Welsh documentary when it has nothing to do with Wales and everything to do with outerspace? Because when I was watching it this time (I love this movie) I realized that the key poem that runs throughout the movie, as first recited by Michael Caine playing the central NASA scientist, was by Dylan Thomas 'Do not go gentle into that good night/old age should burn and rave at close of day/rage, rage against the dying of the light'.
See? All about Wales. You had no idea.
