Day 37 – Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 March 2001 - Upnor to Gillingham

8.5 miles walked today

463.5 miles walked in total (average 12.52)

On Saturday, I left Portsmouth just before seven o’clock to pick Sam up from Epsom and we were in Upnor at nine twenty, ready to start walking.

I’ve been a bit nervous about walking this weekend, due to the foot and mouth breakout.  We knew that we’d have only a few miles to walk – there is a total footpath ban in Kent – and Gillingham was the last place we could reach before we would be back in farmland.  But we’d already worked out that we would be doing plenty of sightseeing and mooching instead.

From Upnor, we were on roads to Frindsbury – we could see the church we had to head for on top of the hill, but, unfortunately, we had to cross a dual carriageway to get there.  Which meant a quick dash across one side, leaping over the barrier in the middle of the road, and then another sprint to the other side.

It wasn’t long before we’d got to the Rochester bridge, which was decked out with lots of stone lions, and had a magnificent view of the cathedral and castle.  There’s been a bridge on this site since Roman times and it has quite a history of being burnt down, knocked down and generally falling down.

As soon as we got into Rochester High Street, we popped into the first second hand bookshop we found.  Unfortunately, we bought so many books that we realised we’d never be able to walk any further with all this extra weight to carry.  A quick decision was made – we’d sightsee today and walk tomorrow.  And with that, we popped into the cathedral tea rooms for a cuppa!

The rest of the day was spent in the cathedral, looking around the shops, wandering up and down the high street, laughing at all the shop names – Mrs Bumble’s tea rooms, Peggoty’s tea rooms, Fagin’s café, etc.   We didn’t pop into the Dickens centre, but we did go and have a look at his house and the chalet/ summer house he used to write in.

After getting a taxi back to the car (we couldn’t even be bothered to walk the two miles back to collect it!) we dashed back into Rochester for a pizza before heading off to the youth hostel, a converted oast house in the middle of Capstone Country Park.  As we drove into the park, we could see all the red and white tape up closing all the footpaths and bridleways.

The youth hostel was hardly what could be called over subscribed – in fact, there were only four of us in the place, so the warden gave us a four bedded room instead of the usual two.  Marvellous – even more room to make more mess!  It wasn’t long before the contents of the rucksacks were spread out over the floor and we could look at our literary purchases.

We had purchased some emergency provisions – in the form of three bars of chocolate each and some hot chocolate sachets – so we dashed down to the lounge with our goodies to take possession of the TV remote control.  We discovered someone else already in there – blinking cheek!  We did the obligatory exploring of the bookcases and games and decided on a game of scrabble, which threw up such gems as “suffix”, “svelte” and “zephyr”!  I won’t reveal the scores as I don’t want Sam to feel inadequate.

On Sunday morning, we had breakfast with the mother of one of our agency engineers in Portsmouth, whose wages I’d been (indirectly) responsible for paying during the past year!  Spooky!

The walking was very peaceful around the docks and we spotted oyster catchers, seagulls, swans and ducks, all grubbing around in the mud for food.  Unfortunately, the sun decided it wasn’t coming out today and it was very grey.  We made our way down to St Mary’s Island past Chatham docks and (eventually!) found the path around the edge of the island which would give us a view straight across to Upnor Castle.  It decided, at this point, to snow.  As it was so cold, we didn’t linger very long to check the history out – apparently the Dutch invaded in 1667 and destroyed ships in the Medway, after attacking Sheerness on Sheppey.  Then they turned round and went home, without proceeding further upriver.  I’m not entirely sure why – we would have been a sitting duck.  Perhaps we made it too easy for them and we weren’t enough of a challenge.

It didn’t take us very long at all to get to Gillingham through the shopping centre and to the rail station, to get the train back to Rochester.  Unluckily for us, the pub that we’d earmarked for lunch was full, so it was a quick dash back to Epsom to meet Paul in Bella Pasta for dinner.

A very good weekend – not very much walking, but lots of laughing, shopping and eating chocolate.  All my very favourite things!