A 200-Mile Walk Across England Is the Perfect Honeymoon

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The next morning my knees were swollen and puffy, and the pads of my feet, when I put my weight upon them, seemed to burst into flames.

“I hope you’re not as bad as me,” I told Emma as I hobbled to the bathroom.

“Oh, I’m not,” she said.

But when I got out of the shower five minutes later, I was delighted to notice several Band-Aid wrappers lamely hidden beneath crumpled paper in the garbage bin.

“Emma?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“How bad are they?”

“Not as bad as your knees.”

She sounded proud of this, but it was true. She only had a small, wet bubble on the tip of each pointer toe, and another on the side of her left pinky toe.

“I’m going with a cautious but optimistic number of Band-Aids,” she said.

When I asked how she’d gotten blisters while wearing the same shoes she’d run half marathons in all spring, she pulled on a new pair of waterproof running shoes—cue ominous drums—and said, “Running down your middle name with wet feet.”

We stuck to the plan anyhow, going two miles out of our way to ogle a semi-famous boulder where many of my British climbing heroes had climbed, reasoning that day three would still be the shortest of our entire walk, a mere 9.7 miles.

This turned out to be a bad idea.

Four miles in, when we reached the top of the 1,500-foot climb to Lining Crag, we were dismayed to come upon the oceanographer and his wife, since it meant we had to disguise the fact that we were severely flagging.

“How are you holding up?” he asked.

“Hard to complain with these views,” I said, gesturing down to the valley, which I only then noticed was invisible behind the fog.

He smiled, then invited us to walk with him. His wife wanted to talk about American politics and English politics, but when it became clear that we were all on the same side, the oceanographer grew bored and said they were stopping for lunch. “Oh, and by the way,” he said, “the best thing to do when your feet hurt is remove your shoes.”

Remove our shoes? But that meant stopping! Instead we forged on. By mile seven, I was driving Emma crazy by saying “youch, youch, youch” with every step.

When we finally stumbled into the pretty little village of Grasmere—which is dominated by Wordsworth tourism, because he’s buried there—I was nearly in tears. As I lay on the floor of our hotel room, elevating my throbbing legs, I performed two sets of mental calculations. First, that we’d done 48 miles—instead of Wainwright’s book’s suggested 35—in three days. Second, that even if we continued via the shortest possible route, we still had another 90 miles before our rest day six days later.

I relayed these facts to Emma while she applied Neosporin to her weeping blisters.

“In very American fashion, we seem to have underestimated England’s mountains,” she admitted. “But we can slow down, Steve. We can take breaks.”