Weather: 🌤️☀️🌤️☀️🌤️
Breakfast: 🥪🥪🥪🥪🥪 (5 out of 5, french toast and eggs Benedict heaven!)
Track: 🇬🇧🇬🇧 (2 out of 5, not to well signposted out of the city, and overall not the most inspiring trail. some parts were really nice though!)
Campsite: ⛺⛺⛺ (3 out of 5, flat, sheltered reasonably quiet, for the environment it’s in!)
Downside of campsite: it’s next to the highway bridge over the Mersey river…
Name of followed trail: Trans Pennine trail
Special mention: Karen and her dad Terry (a real 92 year old Scouser, who’s still walking up the hill!) whom we met along the way. We had a really nice chat. Terry’s open and spontaneous attitude warmed our hearts. Great to have met you!
After 2 days of not-hiking, it’s time to start our English part of the walk, on the Trans Pennine Way. But first it’s breakfast time! We go back to the Moose café, and get ourselves 2 really good plates of food!
After that it’s time to collect the bags Ang head to the pier where the trail starts at the memorial for the enginemen of the Titanic, who lost their lives because they kept the ship working so others could escape. We start the trail without any signs, but the GPX in the watch helps us through the first part of Liverpool.
It takes us through the city centre, and through several residential areas and parks. We go the wrong way several times, because the signs are sometimes turned on the pole, pointing in the wrong direction. This is not that much of an issue most times, only when I find out one of these misses made me go passed the name sign of Penny Lane. I was kind of looking forward to that, because I thought it was fun that the trail actually goes over Penny Lane. So did we, but now without knowing, because I decided for once not to go back to where we went wrong. Lesson learned …
We make a little detour to go past the gates of Strawberry fields, and just before we get back on track , we have lunch at a lovely pub called the Black Bull.
The trail follows a niche track on an old railway, a green corridor in the city. From there, it goes through some corridor’s that get us across railways and roads, through an industrial area. Not the most interesting , but it gives a sense of ‘we’re going somewhere’. We enter a residential area that’s squeezed in between the highway and the John Lennon airport, before we leave Liverpool.
After that we enter Hale, a nice little village (with an airport nextdoor though). It has a pub where everyone is sitting outside enjoying the sun! We join them for a drink and a rest. What a great place!
I see children with ice cream coming by. There must be an ice cream truck nearby! We pack our stuff and head on. Not to far from the pub we find the source of the ice cream, Mr Whippy! With an ice cream, we continue our trail towards Widnes, through an estuary park on the banks of the Mersey. In the distance we see the 3 bridges of Widnes span across the river. Its a cool sight in a nice part of the trail.
We walk along the estuary when a man greets us with a bright smile and asks us if we’d want to guess his age. I thought 80 (so went for 75 as an answer), but he replies he’s 92! We have a little chat with him about Liverpool and the soccer club. Apparently he’s one of Liverpool’s biggest fans, and is well known for being so. With such a friendly and enthusiastic personality, we can well imagine he is! His daughter comes along and joins the conversation. We have a lovely chat with, whom we now know as Karen and Terry, and go our separate ways.
We continue along the Mersey banks into Widnes and get a soda (and water supply) at the pub before we go looking for a place to camp just outside the village in the park. We manage to find a good, secluded spot, which is nice, because we don’t know the English attitude towards free camping yet…
We have a dinner picnic until the sun goes down and then pitch our tent.