Day 26 - Scarborough

Distance Walked:  26.5km, Actual Time Taken: 6h 24m, Estimated Time Taken: 6h
Ascent (GPS): 899m, Ascent (Watch): 444m, Descent (GPS): 915m, Descent (Watch): 442m
Wine: 2 glasses Nero D'Avola (You Can Drink It), 1 glass limoncello (Harmless)

Even allowing for the fact that one of those kilometres I walked was me searching for the public toilets in Ravenscar, today was a long day.  Longer than yesterday which is not what my route notes promised.  They claimed that today would be a good 4km shorter than it was.

Last night the weather forecast for today was constant light showers all day.  By this morning this had changed to being overcast with heavy rain from 2pm to 4pm.  What actually happened was there was a strong south-easterly breeze which blew all the rain clouds over my head and out to sea so I didn't get rained on at all.  That was the plus side.  The minus side was I was walking mostly in a south-easterly direction all day so into a strong head wind.  Today was a very, very long day.  Door to door it took me longer than yesterday and I stopped for lunched yesterday and bought jewellery.  

What made it even harder was Scarborough itself.  I had said Whitby was the biggest seaside resort in Yorkshire.  I lied.  Scarborough is three times the size.  Just to make things worse it is actually based around two bays - the imaginatively named North and South Bays.  Given I'm walking in a southerly direction I naturally reached the North Bay first.  It felt liked I'd arrived.  There were people, cars, shops and cafes and suburbia.  However, my hotel is in South Bay so I had another 4km to walk before I was done.

My hotel here, the Palace Hill Hotel, is one of my favourites of all the ones I've stayed in.  However, Scarborough started as a fishing village in a narrow cove so it is up hill.  Also, the hotel is an old house that was built for rich merchants with stables underneath so you have to walk up steps to get to the front door.  Then my room is one of the attic rooms.  Very cute with a sloping ceiling but it is up another 3 flights of stairs.  I haven't been reduced to crawling up the stairs but I did think about it.

No photos from today as I had been expecting rain so everything was packed carefully away in multiple layers of plastic.  However, below is a sign from Sandsend beach.  You clearly need to be hard core to have a beach holiday in Yorkshire.

And as I said, the tides are no joke as can be seen from the tide info board in Whitby yestersday.

For dinner tonight I went to the Tricolos Italian restaurant just up the street from my hotel.  There was a sign in the window saying they were looking for an experienced chef which was a bit ominous.  However, on the plus side the wait staff were talking to each other in Italian.  The service was very Italian too.  The women were brusque and the men flirtatious.  I didn't have a starter but for main I had a pizza with funghi and proscuitto.  It was listed on the menu that way but with the English translation of mushrooms and ham.  I asked my (female) waiter if it was actually proscuitto or just ham and she decided that meant I wanted to order that pizza.  It turned out to be ham.  Still, it also turned out to be a decent pizza.  Crispy base and the right amount of topping.  I'd rate it somewhere between Harmless and You Can Eat It.  Also, it was enormous.  A good 30+ centimetres in diameter.  All the same I didn't so much eat it, as enhale it.  I hadn't had lunch so I was starving.

For dessert I had tiramisu (of course) with a glass of limoncello.  Sadly both were Dull.  The tiramisu had the cream to biscuit ratio wrong (too much cream), no taste of marsala wine (typical of restaurant tiramisu) but, criminally, barely any taste of coffee.  The limoncello tasted as if it was made with lemon essence rather than lemon juice - a bit chemical and not entirely nice.  Still it was all a pleasant change from pub grub.

Tomorrow is my last day of walking and I have to confess I'm pretty much done.  It will be Day 21 of actual walking and Day 27 of the whole holiday.  I'm ready to get home, sleep in my own bed, not have to walk any further than I want to and not have to pack my suitcase every day!  On the other hand, I'm so not looking forward to cooking my own meals, making my own bed or cleaning my own house.  Swings and roundabouts.