About an Australian Lady

I’ve been meaning to write a bit more about our walking trip in the Lake District, and then Wales and Cornwall, but Katharina already did that quite funnily. Check it out here: whatsupinuk.blogspot.co.uk

Instead, I’m going to tell some tales from the road.

We met this elderly Australian lady in Shap in the pub. She was walking the whole Coast-to-coast path with a group of other Australians, and we had met them more than once before on the trail. She was married, and her husband came with her from Australia to England on vacation. In 30 years of marriage they had never been apart for longer than a week. Unfortunately, her hubby preferred playing golf to climbing mountains, so they agreed to go separate ways for the three weeks it would take the group to finish the Coast-to-coast walk. He dropped her off at the starting place in St. Bees, where we, too, took off. He then took his rental car and went sightseeing for a bit in the Lake District, before he set off to a golf resort in Birmingham.

After a tough first day of hiking, the Australians reached their destination in Cleator. I remember our first day vividly. The backpack was heavy, the first bruises on the hips and shoulders were forming, and my knees and feet just couldn’t make up their minds whether or not to make trouble. The main problem was the morale, though, since the landscape just wasn’t that pretty, and I was secretly wondering if we had made a huge mistake with this whole undertaking. In the evening, all I wanted was a hot shower, hot dinner, and a pint. I imagine the Australian lady felt similarly, only that she was going to stay in a nice B&B where she could probably take a bath and have a whole room just for herself. But what a surprise when she found a postcard at this B&B waiting for her, written by her dear husband! And the bigger surprise was that she found a postcard like that also in each of the other B&Bs she stayed in on her trip until we met her in Shap. When she thought that her husband was sightseeing he had actually been on a secret mission to stop at every single place she would be sleeping in and drop off a postcard for her.