The Long Walk

The first day Nicole was here we decided to go for a hike. There are a number of tempting trails that I had been considering, both through Reading and out into the country side, and finally we decided on the Thames trail. The Thames, of course, is a rather large river than cuts horizontally (more or less) through the south of England. I'm not sure where it starts, but it passes through Reading about half way to London. After consulting a few maps we decided that we would hike the trail about 5 miles up to Mapledurham House, an old mansion on the Thames that's open for tours. We also saw that there was a pub right next to it, so even though we set out a bit late (11:00) we figured we would just have a late lunch at the pub before heading back.

It was an excellent plan...

However, Mapledurham House and the pub are on the OTHER side of the Thames, this means you have to cross a foot bridge to get to them from the trail we were following. Unfortunately, when we got as far as the footbridge, there was an area cordoned off for construction. To get this far, we had taken a detour through some neighborhoods and actually come out farther down-river from the bridge, so we decided it was possible that if we approached the bridge from the other side of the trail, we could still access it. This was not the case. The construction must have been specifically for the bridge because we couldn't get any closer to it than the picture. At this point, we were quite disappointed and more than a little peckish.

Before we left, we took some pictures of Mapledurham House (and the pub) from accross the Thames. The next closest bridge was back where we had started, five miles downriver. Instead, we decided to give up and head into town for food. At one point we had been detoured from the path because it went through private property, and there had been a restaurant right at that detour. We made our way back to it, but found in was closed for renovations. Great. We continuted on. After another mile or two we started getting back into civilization. We stopped at several pubs, but were out of luck once again. It was not about 3:30 in the afternoon and pubs, in general, don't serve food between 2:00 and 5:00. We had missed lunch hour. Even the fast food places and restaurants we passed were closed. Finally, we gave up. We were too tired to keep walking, so we tried one more pub and when they told us they were no longer serving food, we just ordered a cider and spent an hour playing Set in the corner and very aggressively not walking.

Refreshed, we headed home. On the way, we passed by Todd and Sweeney's, a pie shop that Russell had found good reviews for online. We had tried to patronize them on Sunday, but they were closed, so we took the opportunity to duck in Monday and get dinner. Now, when I say "pie shop" I mean meat pies, not dessert pies. They had around fifteen different individual size savory pies to pick from. We got steak and kidney pie, steak and cheese pie, and Vicar's pie (which had an assortment of meats and vegetables). Nicole also bought a steak and potato pastie, which we devoured before we got home.

In spite of being foot sore and hungry, however, it was a very nice hike. We saw a lot of interesting things along the river, On the path side (south side) there were mostly just fields between the river and the railway, but on the north side of the river, there were all sorts of houses. Some of them were broken down shacks that must have been there for ages, and others were clearly well maintained vacation homes. There were flower gardens and boats to see, and one house even had its own helicopter. Neither Nicole or I thought to pull out our cameras for this (we were too busy gawking) but as we rounded on this one particularly fancy house, we could see the top of the helicopter and propeller sticking out over a hedge. We have no idea how they got it back there... there was very little room around it for taking off and landing, but they had managed to nest it in there somehow. There were also a good number of water birds, mostly swans, out on the river. We got to wach the swans taking off from the water. It was quite impressive. No small feat, to be sure. They would flap as hard as they could, and run along the water to help pick up speed. It was almost painfull watching them, they needed so much runway to get airborne.