At the end of November, I did an 8 mile coastal walk.  Today we did it backwards.  Or rather in reverse.  So we started by taking the bus to the centre of Margate and walked back to Ramsgate.

First though I had that left over portion of pumpkin and berry breakfast crumble with Greek yogurt.  It didn’t look so pretty today but tasted wonderful and somehow the strong clove flavour had gone.  16 WW points as I had a lot of yogurt.  We were having a very relaxed morning at the beach house and I ate my breakfast in the sitting room (which I never allow at home) while I read.  Another rule from home broken.  It is fun having virtually no rules in the holiday home :-).  I am reading The Girl Who Played With Fire which is the second of the Millennium Trilogy (Girl with Dragon Tattoo) and am totally engrossed in it.  So I had a delightful morning lying in bed late, reading and then sitting on the sofa, reading.

Having consulted the tide tables, there was no point leaving too early or we would not have been able to walk along the beach as high tide was just after 11:30 am.  So we left the house at about that time and walked down to the bus stop which is next to the harbour, an easy 5 minute walk from our house.

We caught the Thanet Loop which is a superb service as it is very regular and very reasonable.  £1.90 adult and 95 p for a child, one way from Ramsgate to Margate which took about half an hour.

I used to love the Morecambe and Wise show.  This was in the Old Town, Margate.

We left Margate behind us and strode out for Ramsgate.

Harvey didn’t spend much time walking with us at first as he was more interested in climbing the cliffs.

Or walking on the beach whereas we walked along the promenade.

There was a lot of seaweed washed up on the beaches which the Sanderlings enjoyed hunting through for food.

Between Margate and Broadstairs high tide cut off our route along the beach and we headed up to the cliff tops.

Harvey enjoyed playing in the flint built ruin beside the golf course.

When we got to Kingsgate Bay, I knew we were about half way.  I wanted to walk on the beach rather than round North Foreland which is a long and boring stretch of road walking through a residential estate.  But the sea had cut off one of the bays so we popped in to the Captain Digby for a drink.  Captain Digby was built between 1763 and 1768 so it is rather old.  We enjoyed a drink (whisky with ginger ale for me) and the men had a bag of crisps.  Mine was 4 points.  Actually Harvey didn’t like his Slush Puppie which I was delighted about so he just had a glass of water.  He said it tasted “weird”.  That’s how food dye and artificial flavours do taste.

We only spent 20 – 30 minutes in the pub but that was enough for the tide to have turned enough for us to proceed along the beach.

Just beyond Kingsgate Bay, there was a stretch of chalk platform we had to walk along and the cliffs are covered in moss.

Luckily it is not slippery to walk on.

It’s a very unusual landscape.

Harvey’s favourite find of the day was ….

… a smashed up car that had obviously been wedged in to the base of the cliffs for a long time.

I was more interested in the 39 steps.  They lead up to a private housing estate nowadays but used to lead to a convalescent home where John Buchan stayed before he wrote the novel of the same name.  In the novel the steps lead to a loch.

Round the corner was some of the yellow brick road, but we didn’t see Dorothy.

We were all beginning to feel tired when we saw Broadstairs,  What a welcome sight as we knew from here we only had an hour to go.

We reached Ramsgate as it began to get dark.  The walk took 4 hours exactly from getting off the bus to reaching our front door.

We had no food in the house and did not want to eat out so James heroically collected pizza.  There is a Pizza Express near the house.  I enjoyed a hot bath with Radox muscle soak and a cup of tea while we waited.  Bliss.

I had an American Hot with a salad.  28 points!!!!  Thanks to my activity points, I have ended the week in credit.  I have about 15 points left.  I expect some will be used on a large glass of something red when we get home.

We ate in the sitting room, in somewhat of a vegetative state.

I would say, “what lazy slobs”, but we are not as we had just walked 8 miles along the coast, backwards.