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Second Week Change

Well, we've had a week of fantastic scenery and sights. The coastline is breathtaking more often than not and ever changing. The villages along the way with their stonework buildings and slate or thatched roofs are picturesque and old.  We had dinner in a pub that had been built in 1756, and it
wasn't the oldest building built in it's village, Westleigh- the church was. The churches are usually the oldest buildings in any of the villages, most of them built 600 years before.
Everything is draped, clothed, or consumed with vegetation. In the forests, there's ivy on the trees. In the fields, anything that hasn't been mowed or grazed recently is overgrown with vines, shrub, or ferns. I'd thought I was used to veg, but I was wrong. I feel like I've been overexposed to chlorophyll. The plants seem gentler or more civil here, less pokey, clawy, or prickly than at home. Matthew invented a game he calls 'Nettled or Not',  where he sticks his hand indiscrimately into the hedges as he walks past to see what's in there, saying "Not! Not! Not! Nettles! Not!" , depending on whether he gets stung or not.

When the sun peeks through the clouds, briefly (only briefly it seems), all the plants steam off and exhale. It's a weird sensation walking through it, a flavor of claustrophobia I'd never felt before.
So, when the sun is shining we get steamed, gently. When it's not, we get fogged, drizzled, showered, or hosed. Whatever we're being treated to, it's usually shortlived and variable. What's been constant though, is the damp. Socks, shirt, shorts, underwear. We can get things dry, sort of, but never dry enough to get the funk out of them. I stopped in a village with a public toilet and nicked a bunch of paper towels, and lined my underwear with them diaper style as an experiment. I was rewarded with nearly a half hour of dryness before they too, became damp.  I kept on walking, feeling funky again.
If I was here by myself, I'd
probably be carrying on with the program as planned. "Carry on, trust in God, and keep your bowels open," as my new friend Charles, the Barnstaple dairyman advised me. But I'm not alone here, and the other two with me probably have more sense I than me and Charles do. So why keep them here to the original plan?
Plans I made in ignorance. Let's go to Poole, at the other end of the trail and work back around clockwise. 
We'd met a guy from Scotland walking the coast path and he'd started from Poole. He'd thought the weather would be easier for him in the early season starting there and ending at Minehead. I kept that in mind.  A couple other things also made me wonder if we were too early in the season for the Minehead end. There's lichen on everything. A wet fluttery type, that doesn't handle long periods of dry, that loves drizzle or really heavy dews. It's still in it's fluttery, slimy form.  But it must get dry there eventually though. We'd walked past miles of barley fields, and farmers wouldn't be planting the stuff if they couldn't eventually harvest it.
 I'd been chatting a bit with a few locals in the villages. Nice people, except for a couple, and one thing they had in common was that circumstance had landed them there where they were. For the most part, anyway.  Nobody said to me, "I'd always wanted to live in Clovelly, me did, now I do eh?" or "Me loves me undies damp and funky me dews, so me lives 'ere,"  for instance. 
Poole is a bigger city, and expensive, presumably because a lot of people chose to live there. My hope it's because they don't have to stuff paper towels in their shorts to live there. Unless they want to. 

So we're here and will find out. After an exciting and stressful day of catching trains and  buses, and a pricey night at a hotel, we'll go round the other way. Ocean on our left now, and sheep on our right. And, thankfully, blissfully, it really is drier here. No need to stuff anything in my shorts.  
And I think Rhonda and Matthew might enjoy this adventure without needing to try as hard as they have been to this point. 
I'll add some photos from our first week to this and close.

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