Fifth Week

 I went nowhere today and am feeling a bit guilty about it. One of the things I learned hiking the PCT, was how important zero days are for the long haul. You know, those occasional days you take off trail going nowhere, washing and drying your gear, resting your knees.  My gear and my knees are thanking me, but I'm feeling restless. It will take me 20 more days to finish this trail if I follow the Southwest Coastal Path recommended schedule.  My flight reservation has me boarding a Boeing 777 for home in 20 days.  I can't fritter.

I think I'll make it, though. The path's terrain seems to be getting more refined and less ridiculously rugged as it works it's way along the ocean back towards London.  A bit smoother, a bit wider, and crossing fewer unnecessary contour lines.

There's been less need to leave the main trail and travel inland to save my feet, but I do it anyway once in a while so I can visit cows.  I escorted a retired fisherman through a herd that he was convinced was out to kill him. It was strange to see him so nervous about a bunch of cheerful jelly-bellies after surviving and retiring from an occupation that features so many things that really are trying to kill you.  I mean, just look at this freckly girl.. is that the face of a killer?

Arrived in Falmouth shortly after escaping the freckle-nosed killer cow and her friends, a sizeable city. There were two cruise ships in the harbor there, a shipyard and gray navy vessels.  A ferry took me to an island in the middle of the harbor, then another to the far shore. I walked past a couple beaches in the morning and was surprised to see how many people were up and out swimming in the ocean water and how far out from shore they were so early.

Two of them, a middle aged maybe hippie couple were just finishing their swim and chatted with me a bit. They asked if I had a tent in my backpack. I told them I did.

 "You need to wild camp at Nare Point," the guy told me. "It will change your life."  "Spiritual," his partner added.

They described the point, where to load up on groceries for a wild camp overnight, and where to fill up with water before the point. 'Wild' camping is what they call camping without permission on privately owned land, which here in England is everything thing that isn't water. 

You shouldn't shop for groceries when you're hungry, but when I got to the Spar store (England's version of 7/11) I was. Maybe that's why I bought a chocolate cake with frosting for the next morning's wild camp breakfast and put it in my backpack.  When I got to the water stop the swimming hippies had told me about I filled up, then started up the steep trail to the point. It was solid work. It was hot, the first day that it hadn't rained since I'd started this trip, and my pack was heavy from the extra water and poorly balanced as well with my some of my gear hanging off the sides to make room for the cake.

The point had a glorious 270 degree ocean view, and would doubtless become spiritual as sunset came. There was one small flat spot there, so I took off my pack and sat on it to wait.  But I noticed, sitting there waiting, just how bad I smelled. Deprived of it's daily rain shower, my t-shirt had turned mean. I took the rancid thing off and flung it over a bush. That was better.  I'd stopped walking earlier than my usual routine and it became obvious that spiritualism, if it came to me at all, would come after boredom.  I had cell service, so used some battery power to celebrate my stinky shirt on Facebook.  I was well pleased with my wittiness, but still bored.  And boredom, as often happens, brings cravings. And in the top of my pack was a chocolate cake.

As the sun began to set, I learned two things; that there was road within short walking distance of Nare Point, and that local residents who love each other like to go there to watch it.

I was surprised when that first couple came around the last boulder, but not as surprised as they were to see a shirtless stinky old guy sitting on a backpack and eating a chocolate cake like an oversized hamburger. 

"You alright?" I asked. 

I said, 'You alright?' because it seems to be the local greeting of choice, but with my mouth muffled and filled with cake, what came out sounded more like "All Right!", making me sound friendly enough, but regrettably in more of an over-anxious creepily voyeuristic sort of way.

The guy just stood and stared blankly at me, stiff upper lipped and all with a wine bottle wrapped in a beach blanket under his arm. His girl, though said, "This is shite. A right bloody wanker 'e is," and turned around,which summarized the apparent situation quite succinctly.  

My presence there disrupted two more couple's evening plans, but it was too late to hike on to the next commercial campsite. I could see another spot about  a quarter mile off and downslope, just before the rock rounded over to vertical cliff that looked maybe flat enough to pitch a tent on. I worked my way over, and it turned out to be a small crater of broken rock, covered over with grass and bracken ferns. It was a damned weird terrain feature, but it worked for the night.

I was packed up and off before sunrise and an hour down the trail came across an old WWII bunker and a placard explaining Operation Starfish. Falmouth had extensive shipyards, valuable bombing targets. Operation Starfish situated lights around Nare Point, so that from the air at night it looked like Falmouth.  Did the decoy work?  Pretty well.  The Luftwaffe hit Nare Point in night raids 768 times over the course of the war, thinking the whole time they were bombing the shit out of Falmouth. Operation Starfish, by getting German bombs dropped onto Nare Point, saved dozens of navy ships, and hundreds of British lives. 

And one of those bombs, dropped one of those nights hit on a rock shoulder that would otherwise slope smoothly over to a vertical cliff face above the sea, and left a crater just big enough to pitch a tent in.

Some more photos from the trail...