Let's go on a trip, she said. Let's celebrate Katie's graduation from high school, she said. Fabulous, we chorused. England? Even better. When she got that funny gleam in her eye (just the one--the left one), I should have known better. Having walked the Camino de Santiago the previous year, Sarah's idea of vacation has been slightly tweaked. You know, the sort of slight derailment that comes when you go to smack a spider on the wall and your hand goes through the drywall? Yah. That kind of tweakiness. Knowing we would never agree to a five hundred mile trek, Sarah thought she'd scale back.* It'll be relaxing. It'll be English.
Enter the Coast to Coast Walk across northern England. It's beautiful--it's two hundred miles trekking through three of the country's most ridiculously picturesque national parks: the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, and the North York Moors. The trail begins at the Irish Sea in St. Bees in the West and ends at the North Sea in Robin Hood's Bay in the East. Don't believe me on the gorgeous? Just take a look:
But that's the funny thing about pictures, isn't it? You're not cold or wet or lost or panting, how did my mother put it?, like a hippopotamus on a treadmill to get to said location. Most sections of the trail are encouragingly labeled as "strenuous" and are largely unmarked. As a matter of fact, many of the guidebooks encourage hikers to carry whistles so they can signal for help should they get lost in the mists that roll suddenly across the above beautiful hills, making it impossible to see more than a few feet. And these bogs, to listen to my mother, resemble the marshes outside Mount Doom. I believe all this madness is personally crafted by the trail's creator, Alfred Wainwright, in order to "encourage in others the ambition to devise with the aid of maps their own cross-country marathons and not be merely followers of other people's routes: there is no end to the possibilities for originality and initiative."
Thanks, Al. Way to put us on a two hundred mile trail with no trail in order to encourage our originality and initiative. I'm sure that's exactly what that breeds.
So for the last six months, I have been receiving phone calls from my mother detailing what type of pants and shirts and jackets and ponchos and snacks and bags and money are necessary for this trip while the devious mastermind behind this trek has been emailing me delightful bits about how we scale nearly to the elevation of Leadville** on multiple occasions, how imperative it is to wear the right underwear and socks, and what delightfully quaint English towns we'll be staying in along the way. (As if any of us will look at anything other than our pillows after a twenty-mile day. Of which there are TWO.) My little sister, Katie, the only sane one among us, has been sending me phone pictures of her trekking shoes elegantly propped up on a coffee table. Half the preparation, you know, is getting your shoes on your feet.
This is madness, you say. Well, yes. But more than that, This is quintessentially Moffett.
So, exactly eleven days from today, the lawyer-turned-crusader Sarah, the planner-turned-adventurer Rachel, the dancer-turned-tea-addict Katie, and me, the lynchpin who agreed to this insane venture, will be somewhere over the Atlantic. Hopefully, still in a plane.
*Sarah's definition of scale-back: Climb Kilimanjaro, not Everest.
**The small mining town in Colorado where our father is from that is at such a high elevation I get winded walking up a stair. Yes, just one stair.
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