Northumberland, Part 1: Walking Holiday
Traditionally, Thanksgiving is quite the holiday for us back home. We always host a Thanksgiving dinner for our family, which involves tons of baking and cooking most of the weekend. It’s my favourite holiday of the year, as it incorporates some of my favourite things in the world: great food, family time, cooking, baking, and reflecting on things that we are grateful for in our lives. It’s at a time of year that just feels so cozy and where some of our favourite foods and spices are most plentiful. It’s also a holiday that has no materialistic side, such as gift giving.
This year, our Thanksgiving weekend looked very different. Jon asked if I’d like to have a small Thanksgiving celebration just for the four of us, but it just didn’t feel right. It wouldn’t be the same without all our amazing family there to celebrate with us.
Rather than the traditional Thanksgiving weekend full of cooking, we took a four-day trip up to Northumberland. It was still a time of family togetherness, reflecting on what we’re grateful for, and lots of nature, walking, and exploration. All of these are additional loves of mine that we were able to incorporate into our Thanksgiving this year.
The main focus of our trip was a walking holiday. I adore walking holidays, having done them with Jon, with Jon and a friend of ours, and taking a solo trip to do one alone. I’ve been so excited to do another while we are in England and to introduce the concept of walking holidays to the girls to see how they would like them.
We weren’t able to do the full, traditional walking holiday where we walked from one town to the next, staying in a different place each night as we made our way through our route. Unfortunately, everywhere seemed to want a minimum two- or three-night commitment to stay there. Instead, we based ourselves in Alnwick and relied on a combination of a rental car and local buses to make our way along our route. Driving to the day’s starting point, walking to our end destination, taking the bus back to the starting point, and then driving back to Alnwick. It wasn’t ideal as we had to push to walk a little faster and explore a little less the one day to accommodate the bus schedule, but we made it work!
In total, we hiked 60 km over our four-day weekend! The first and last days were smaller hiking/walking days, as they involved driving to/from Northumberland and other explorations (more on that to come in Part 2!). The bulk of the hiking was on Days 2 and 3, where we did 25 km and 20 km, respectively.
The weekend was, unfortunately, quite rainy. However, we did not let that deter us. We find rain in the UK to be much more pleasant than back in Canada. It is much finer rain, almost misting a lot of the time. Unlike the harder more pelting and unpleasant rains back home. So, while we were soaked to the bone by the time we got home on Saturday in particular, we still managed to have a fabulous time walking.
We saw some gorgeous sights along the way, which were mostly along the coastline. There were some gorgeous castle ruins, beaches to explore, cute cafes to stop at for tea breaks, and so much more. We saw a ton of snails on our pathway, and the girls made sure to stop and move each one off the pathway and onto the grass so no one stepped on it. The girls’ favourite stretches to walk on were undoubtedly the beach sections. We were able to alter a few stretches of our walk so that we could incorporate additional beach stretches, and probably spent about half our day on Day 3 and the majority of our day on Day 4 walking along beaches.
Even with the rain, both girls loved the walking holiday and would have happily continued walking for a few more days. Their energy, stamina, enthusiasm, and endurance are impressive for eight-year-olds! It makes my heart happy to know that I’ll always have walking holiday companions in Jon and both of my children.
Walking has become an important and integral part of our typical daily life since we left Canada. Despite this typical behaviour, we walked even more during the walking holiday, especially walking and hiking out in nature and beach settings. We have noticed during all our travels that our girls are both most comfortable when they are in park, rural, or beach settings, surrounded by nature and with few people around. When we end up exploring larger cities or busier locations, they are noticeably less comfortable and content. Jon and I are both natural introverts who love quiet, calm settings and similarly love to be outdoors in nature, so I suppose it’s not surprising they take after us in this regard!
Katia has asked if we can do a lot more walking when we get home. We can (and do) walk out our door here in York and pick from a variety of directions to walk, and do a gorgeous, 5 to 15 km hike on beautiful nature trails. We regularly take an hour-long walk along the river to the next town over to grab a tea or coffee, and then walk home. I love that England is set up so well for hiking and walking everywhere you go. There were tons of similar opportunities in Portugal and Spain for walking and hiking.
Unfortunately, London (and Ontario in general) is poorly set up for walkers unless we want to drive somewhere that’s some distance away, walk on sidewalks through neighbourhoods, or take disjointed pathway systems. But, we will do what we can to keep our walking lifestyle alive and well when we get home as the girls have come to love walking as much as I do over the past few months.