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Day 5 of the Longest Walk

A Change of Scenery.
Lee Bay to Croyde.
So the second instalment of our long distance walk around the SWCP has begun.
We awoke in the Hartland Quay Hotel, we had the one of the rooms with a bay and window seats looking out over the Sea, Anne was in heaven.
The breakfast was of course a Full English, e also ordered a packed lunch which is a first for us on this adventure, more of the packed lunch later!

I had planned on this part of the journey to to time lapse the walk itself, I was hoping to post each day the resulting video, however due to the slow upload speeds at the B&B I will have to try and post those later if we find some faster speeds. For those interested I will be using a GoPro HD2 attached to the strap of my rucksack, battery life I hear those in the know shouting at me, well I purchased a spare GoPro body and doctored it to enable me to attach a USB cord attached to a USB Power Pack.
The lack of upload speed also meant that I could only upload smaller and fewer images than I’d have liked..

The day started beautifully with a clear blue sky and that meant a very warm first few miles, as the start of this section is officially set as challenging. We climbed up out of Lee Bay on the road heading toward Higher Warcombe. We soon left the road back onto the ‘real’ footpath.
The walk once it had left the road and brought us back to views along the coast had as anticipated some fabulous views. We were soon past Pensport and Damagehue Rock, and reached Bull Point which has a Lighthouse, a fully automated light. Moving on and climbing 92 steps not far beyond, which weren’t as bad as we thought they would be, this lead us to Rockham Beach which if we’d had more time we would certainly have visited and maybe took a swim. We did linger close to the Beach however as our first seal was spotted offshore and as Anne loves seals we had to use the binoculars to take a closer look.

The clouds did look threading heading in from the South West but we stayed dry and the warm weather didn’t leave us just yet.
Heading out to Morte Point at the end of which at low tide it seems as though the spines of a dinosaur can be seen creeping out of the sea, we did see this from the other end of Woolacombe Bay.
We took lunch on a small diversion that we took down to Grunta Beach where apparently you can find wheels carried all the way from the Caribbean, as we’re not Shell Experts we couldn’t tell if we’d found any or not!
Now the lunch which I mentioned earlier was ham rolls, crisps, fruit cake, chocolate bar and some fruit, now the fruit was missing slapped wrists Hartland Quay Hotel and I had an alternative to fruit cake which was flapjack which was not nice Sad Oh well everything else was good Happy.

We carried on and had already decided that once we reached the far end of Woolacombe Bay, which is 2 miles long, this is the first beach that we have walked along on this journey that includes last years sections. Although I don’t expect we’ll have many this long to walk along again. We certainly had our swim which again is a first on this journey we are expecting more as we travel round the coast.

After Woolacombe Bay we headed along the path toward Baggy Point which is Nation Trust land. There where some Black Horned sheep on the point yes a picture will follow.
From here we headed down into Croyde and finally took rest at the Parminter B&B.

This section of the walk has certainly a different flavour to the stretch we did over Day 1-4 see earlier blog posts. The rocks were less covered in plant life particularly heather and the walk felt more rugged, however things will change again over the next few days as we cover the estuary of Barnstaple and Bideford.

If you have been thinking about doing a long distance walk, certainly in the UK then look online for a company like Lets Go Walking as they take the strain out of organising the accommodation and transfer of luggage and you, and the experience is well worth the effort of the walking.

*SWCP = South West Coastal Path

Pictures can be found here.

A few stats.
5 hours 15 mins walking. Total This week 5 Hours 30 Mins
Total Walk 24 hours 43 mins
11 miles Distance, including extra walks to beaches and to the ends of any points we visited.
Total This week 11 Miles
Total Walk 58 Miles
Total time out including stops photo opportunity, enjoying tea and cake, 7 hours 15 mins. Total this week 7 hours 15 mins. Total walk time out 34 hours 10 mins

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