London - Day 6

Our last day was the only day we got outside the city, and we sure did a lot of walking.

Last time I was in London, my uncle alerted me to these footpaths that they have all over the country. They've been there forever, and go all over the place (including through towns, over fences, across pastures, through the woods, down driveways, etc.). There are some designated walks collected in a book published every few years, and when I was living in London, my dad came to visit and we took one walk starting out at Hever Castle (very cool).

This time, the plan was to walk from Gomshall to Guildford. This turned out to be a bit of a problem. To get to Gomshall, we had to change trains in Guildford. When we arrived, we learned that the next train to Gomshall didn't arrive for an hour and a half. Rather than wait it out, J and I decided to really challenge ourselves by attempting to do the walk backwards.

Most of it was not too terribly difficult, just a lot of turning the opposite way listed in the directions and turning around to make sure it looked like you were coming from the place you should have been going. There were a few places that got a little hairy, though, like where "the path emerges in a car park." But going the other way, there were three paths that "emerged" into the car park. But we managed, and it was actually really fun (though it probably wouldn't have been if we had not been such expert navigators)!

The first picture is J going over a classic stile, which were all along the walk. The second picture is a scenery shot of the lovely countryside. The last picture is of the Church of St. James, in Shere (a town we passed through on our walk). The church is almost 1000 years old! The wall inside (I didn't take any pics inside the church) has a listing of all the vicars in Shere since 1270! There are gravestones so old that the names and dates can no longer be deciphered, but they are clearly many hundreds of years old. Seeing something like that really does put the history and the meaning of "old" into perspective.

We reached our destination and caught a train from Gomshall back to London, where we spend our last night at the Prince Alfred pub and I finally got the waffle I had been wanting all week!

Our return travels were largely uneventful, save a 1-hour takeoff delay. We got back to Chicago to discover that my car was exactly where I had left it, and made the long drive home the same night.