671.5 miles walked in total (average 11.78)
By coincidence, Katie and I started walking at twelve minutes to eleven again!
The day started off very hazy but soon warmed up and we walked in teeshirts for practically the whole day. We started off by popping into the fort to ask directions out onto the footpath over the cliffs and we were soon on our way, passing the hang gliders and looking down at all the divers down on the beach.
Newhaven Heights is a new housing development of prefab bungalows on top of the cliffs. If the houses - and I've lived in a prefab which was brilliant - hadn't been on top of one another, but had been set in their own fields, they'd have been great. But, in their setting, they looked quite astoundingly ugly!
As we walked along the cliffs to Peacehaven, we marvelled at all the flowers growing along the cliff edge - namely, marigolds and wallflowers which stretched on for miles. Again, we saw lots of people out - on the prom at the bottom of the cliff - and in their gardens and on their balconies. We passed the Meridian at Peacehaven which was quite a milestone again. It's marked in a memorial to George V and gives the distances to various places in the commonwealth and must once have been a fountain, although the water features seem to have disappeared.
From Peacehaven, we made our way along the cliffs - with a short detour onto the main A259 road - through Telscombe to Saltdean where we stopped for lunch. We had to do a bit of decision making about whether to have lunch on the beach or on the cliff - the cliffs won. But only because, if we'd walked down the steps to the beach, we'd have only had to walk back up again. As it was, we made sure we were at the top of the next cliff, before we stopped to eat. We knew that the wind had changed direction as the weather vane on the monument at the top suddenly swung round on its axis as we passed!
The view from our lunch stop was superb. We could see any number of art deco buildings - the Saltdean Lido, the Ocean Hotel overlooking all of Brighton, and the tearooms on the prom, to name a few. By this time, we were feeling quite hot and it wasn't until later that we discovered the extent of our new stripey suntans!
We spotted some quite wacky characters on the beach too. We watched as two chaps, one of whom was done up in red teeshirt and shorts, and blue Crocodile Dundee hat, manoeuvred a bright red canoe down the A259, through the underpass and onto the beach. That would have been enough exercise for me, never mind rowing the blinking thing as well!
We came down into Rottingdean after lunch and had a quick mooch around the shops and stopped on the front for some more people watching. Katie pointed out a pretty little tearoom - The Old Cottage Tea Rooms - so we felt it only right that we stop for a beverage. The garden was fantastic - crammed full of tables and benches - and the borders were full of fantastic, healthy looking shrubs and trees, not to mention bird houses, gnomes and animal ornaments.
We sussed out where the bus stop was in Rottingdean in case we couldn't be bothered to walk any further. I think that, if I'd been on my own, I might have given up then, but Katie was eager to carry on and provided some much needed encouragement.
From Rottingdean, we were back on the cliffs for a while past St Dunstan's School for the Blind, Roedean School for Girls and Brighton Marina.
We had about two minutes to catch the bus back to Newhaven from opposite the pier - so we made a mad dash, running along the pavement with our backpacks knocking people out of the way. We weren't too impressed when the driver saw us and drove off anyway. Humph! We only had to wait ten minutes for the next bus though back to Newhaven, and we walked through the marina again and down to the Hope Inn, for a beer to celebrate the weekend's walking.
It was an excellent weekend, but I'm sure Katie was sad that we'd missed the swingbridge opening twice, today only by ten minutes!
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