Day 61
Gladestry to Kington: 4 miles
Spot of the Day: The Steppes B and B
Reason: Not only was I the first guest ever, I was the first guest with the most hospitable B and B host in history
Short, but lovely hike
So Kington is only actually 4 miles from Gladestry - not far at all. I'd planned it this way because it was just a little too far from Hay-on-Wye, and I didn't have a problem spending more time in Kington the 'Walker's Town' anyway.
So, after my very kind host in Gladestry gave me my clothes back and herself noted that we could in fact be hair twins just like I'd been thinking yesterday (dark curly hair with premature white streaks only on top is not a common hair type here in Wales), I set off back on the trail. Thankfully, the rain had eased up entirely. So I could now actually see the landscape I'd partly walked through the day before. Cute little hills rising steeply up out of nowhere in no seeming pattern, it was a cute little valley. And not soaking wet, the town of Gladestry itself was adorable, a small little center with an inn, the church, and one building that had a strange roof where a turret like top was raised entirely off the roof itself. I don't even know how to describe it.
Anyway, the path went up and up and up and up, until it went across the Hergest Ridge to Kington. The ridge itself had great views, and as I got farther away from Gladestry - it also had a lot of people. While I was goggling at them all, I started to notice something else - my left foot felt wet. As I continued on, I realized that yes, it was definitely wet. Which was strange because it wasn't raining, and I wasn't walking through high grass that would get the shoes wet at all. Taking a look at the bottom of my shoe, I realized the problem - there was a great big crack in one of the treads that was sucking in water. Sighing to myself because I really, really, really, really didn't want to have to break in new shoes 550 miles into a hike, I resigned myself to walking all of Hergest Ridge with a soaking wet left foot.
The Hergest Ridge, by the way, is the place where you might see the Black Dog - and not the pleasant one I seem to have on all my clothes that comes from the bakery/bar in Martha's Vineyard. This Black Dog supposedly presages death for anyone who sees it. Although I kind of wonder a lot of times if these places are where JK Rowling used to hang out (the Grim) - in fact, it's rumored that this is the area where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came up with the idea for the Sherlock Holmes book The Hound of the Baskervilles.
But besides the black dog on my shirt, the only dogs I saw were only on leashes - or at the very least they appeared to belong to people. So hopefully I would live to see another day.
After stopping at a bench sitting in a grove of trees on top of a hill, weirdly set all by themselves, I made my way down to Kington, passed hikers, and people on horses. I stopped for a moment at a lovely Hergest Croft Gardens and really, really wanted to go in - the folks in the church yesterday had recommended it to me - but behind the Gardens I saw a very giant, very black, cloud heading straight for town. Wary of the soaking I'd taken the last two days, I hurried on into Kington (and incidentally, into England - although it sits west of Offas Dyke and thus was Welsh in the 8th century, now it sits just east of - actually literally on - the border on the English side).
Literally right after I'd passed through the high street, the skies opened up and it started to pour. So I ducked into a very conveniently placed unstaffed laundromat to rearrange my jacket, backpack, etc. By the time I was done waterproofing myself the rain had actually stopped, so I wandered back outside and found a museum about the history of the town.
The museum was surprisingly large for a town of 3,000, had ancient relics, etc, and also elephant bones (for reasons I'm still kind of unclear about there was an elephant here at one time). In the back, there's a room dedicated to the WWII military base that was kept nearby, and a rather large focus on the American troops and in particular, the segregation of the American troops by race. It didn't paint the best picture - at that time, although Britain had no such rules, the U.S. still maintained segregated ranks, and expected the town to cater to that. While at first things had gone fine, problems occurred (primarily with white troops apparently finding it necessary to warn off local women who they saw conversing with black men, warning them, according to the Eisenhower quote accompanying the display 'of what they were doing'), and the white and black troops eventually were only allowed into town on different days.
The display also included interviews with locals who had never seen any minorities before, and were shocked when they tried to invite various people in for tea, and were refused on the basis that a black person wasn't supposed to go into a white person's home. The overarching theme, repeated by many of the locals, was shock that someone black who would fight alongside and could eventually save his white counterpart's life would be treated that way.
So we were really showing off the best of America to the town of Kington - racism and segregation, and all things horrible. I know it's not often the focus domestically, but I have to think a lot of Americans would be shocked to know what type of opinion can be formed of Americans, but based on first hand experiences like these even in places that were grateful for our involvement in WWII. But if that's what you saw in your hometown, that would form the entire basis of your knowledge of America, what else would you think? And frankly you wouldn't be entirely wrong, though we often can't admit that to ourselves.
A Night out with the B and B
Aaaaanyway, after being thoroughly depressed I went to the pub for a bit, and then up to my B and B right across the street. Called The Steppes, the host had been particularly excited when I booked a room, then read my blog and decided we were going to be best friends. As it turned out, I wouldn't mind so much because she was great.
The place itself is a cozy, charming, half-timbered (that means the ones with the white facade but with dark beams criss-crossing all over, I think anyway) house over a store, fronting on the high street. The woman who owns it had spent the last 20 years in Utah, I believe on a mountain, as she's married to an American and I think they did property rentals in ski areas. Just moving back to England, she bought this property and was planning on turning the storefront downstairs into a walker's shop, while the adorable upstairs she's running as a B and B.
All I could think the entire time I was there was that this was the kind of place Americans think England is like and then you get to England and you never actually find such a place because it's been torn down and replaced with a more modern place. It was basically full of nooks and crannies, and weird places for closets and corners and just generally you felt like you were in a old half-timbered English cottage that wasn't a fake new building trying to pretend to be an old half-timbered English cottage, which is usually the case.
Anyway, she was really excited about starting this new venture, and I was the first guest ever. After talking for a while about the walk she did from Lands End to Scotland, the blog she wrote about it and the book she self-published, I realized I needed a nap. When I woke up a third person who arrived, who my host had met a few months before, randomly hiking in Wales, and had invited over for the weekend. After they inviting me for a walk back up Hergest Ridge (um, no thank you) we agreed we'd go to dinner at the pub together.
And so we did - and at the pub we met up with two other of my host's friends who were music teachers. I was suddenly realizing I hadn't really eaten dinner at a pub with anyone besides P in months, and although having dinner with P is lovely, having a friendly local group like this was great. The food itself was fine (they had a surprisingly lengthy vegetarian menu actually), but the people were really friendly - we talked about. walking, getting lost all the time and the fact that I'm not carrying a phone with me. But most importantly, they were totally on board with my hatred/fear of cows. I brought it up in one of those 'is it just me, or. . .' type efforts to validate my own craziness, and got the overwhelming response that yes, people who walk in the UK believe it is perfectly valid to fear cows.
These were clearly my people.
After paying up we headed back to the house, and I felt like I was in college (which I am long, long, long past) sitting up and chatting with these ladies late into the evening.
I went to bed thinking that although the hike was only four miles long and I was really going to have to do something about that left shoe (in the short term we'd decided on duct tape) - that this was one of the best days I'd had on this walk. It was a great time.
