To Wrabness! For a big old birthday walk! Technically it wasn’t my birthday. And nope, I’m not Royalty with two birthdays. But I do rather kindly get given a day off work for my birthday, which happens to be a little later in the week. I’m busy with work stuff on the actual big day, and so Monday was put aside for a day of walking over in Wrabness.
The plan seemed simple: catch the train to Wrabness, and then walk The Essex Way all the way across to Harwich. ChatGPT told me it was a leisurely 14km stroll. Never trust Chat GPT, natch.
I was a little knackered before we even started. I was running low on energy. We had a few false starts finding our way out of Wrabness and down to the shoreline. There were plenty of signs saying Private Road. Having wandered for around fifteen minutes trying to find a cut through, we thought BALLS to that, and walked down a private road anyway.
Any progress was halted with a sign saying: DANGER! Coastal erosion! Do not pass. This birthday walk really was trying its best to spoil my big non-day.
Soon we found The Essex Way. It was a bit of an arse, and wasn’t exactly well sign-posted. In fact it was so crap, that it threw us out on a main road for about half an hour. Maybe this is the Essex Way of doing things?
Soon we were off the main road, and back trudging through shit. There was a lone detectorist doing his detector thing in a nearby field.
The final stretch took us towards Dovercourt, with Harwich visible not too far away. Except it was a bloody long walk still to go. I was absolutely knackered and found it a chore. Birthdays have never been so much hard work.
Destination Harwich was reached. It was pretty dead for a Monday afternoon. We did manage to raise some life in a local tea room. Afternoon tea and Cornish pasties is quite a combination.
Hey! Shall we walk back over the 17km route towards Wrabness? Shall we bollocks. The train from Harwich took us back to Manningtree, and then a change for Sunny Colch.
There was a really freaky conversation taking place in the carriage between a middle aged woman and a fella who looked about ten years younger. It was hard to piece it all together, but the general flow was that she was going to tell his Mum how they had both caught the early morning train from Clacton to London en route to the hospital. He then disappeared down a carriage and she caught him with a prostitute and had the photo to prove this.
Sunny Colch couldn’t come soon enough.
Wtf is wrong with this place?
