Life (next to) the Fast Lane

Today I woke up and the sky was flooding, so I went back to sleep. Then, I woke up again, sort of a "take 2: Sun", and it was finally peering shyly from behind the draw curtain. So, I readied for a walk to the County Town of Down from Saintfield. The bus ride is twenty minutes, and all the signs say "Downpatrick: 11" on them. I assumed it was kilometers and figured that it's got to be less than 11 miles anyway; the plan was to hoof it there and back in the beautiful, though spotty, sunlight among the ripply-rolly green of what-comes-to-your-mind-when-you-think-of-Ireland Northern Ireland. Like, the tallest moutain in Ireland (3000 feet) singing in the picture above - which was one of my rewards for my little endeavour today. I started out by walking the 25 minutes into "The Village" ('downtown' Saintfield) and bought the least suspicious looking "biscuits" (cookie-cake things) I could find at the Saintfield Bakery for sustenance on what I was assuming would be about an hour and a half at-(worship)-music-pace walk.
The sidewalk ends about 5 minutes outside Saintfield, which leaves you about a snap pea's long-length -wise length away from the "main trucker's highway between Belfast and Downpatrick", and only some of it was this groomed in terms of plant wildness (but I LOVE how much less obsessed with nature battle-back they are here, even if it did nip at my ankles and turn my socks to dish rags) so I tromped through knee-length grass, heavy with a day and a half of rain to avoid the topple-over-whiz of...you know, all the trucks. I discovered that I'm more sure-footed than it might appear (I really do blame those stealthy gusts of gravity): I was able to rock out to Rita Springer, Keith Green and tobyMac without turning my ankle in the several unexpected (because I couldn't see them) holes, terrain changes or gashing them on tangles of thorn bushes or blackberry vines. For the most part...
After about an hour and a half, I began to think that walking the same direction until you start to feel sore is not really that smart. I'd only passed two bus stops, though (and no bus had passed me so in all honesty, it appears that it was actually faster to walk) and I really wanted to walk to Downpatrick and back, so I kept going. I finally saw a spire in the air and rejoiced in having found the Down (St. Patrick's) Cathedral.
Or the half-way-there point. The deceptive spire was that of a Church of Ireland that, while gorgeous, mocked me as I limped past with all it's standing-still-in-the-same-place-for-the-last-200-hundred-years. For me, though, another "5" to go. The first 5 had taken me just under two hours, and that was without the shooting pain down my right leg.
I left the house in Saintfield at just past 10, and finally arrived in Downpatrick at half(ish) 1. The reason it took me 3 and a half hours is because it actually was 11 miles! I wandered around for a bit, and went to a restaurant that Sally recommended to me - called "Denvir's"(spelled differently, but pronounced like where I'm sort-of originally from) - but decided that I wanted a quaint little coffee cafe, rather than a down-the-nose-posh place, to relax (recover, really) and write, instead. So, with some poking around, I found "The Daily Grind" a block and a half from "St. Patrick Centre" and, after basically one-legging it up a flight of stairs, inched downward into a chair. I sat there for about two hours with my Pink Ginger Thorncot (it's a kind of humbly sparkling, modestly flavored, sharply fresh whistle-wetter) and pita-exploding-of-salad (with crumbly, but not dry, chicken, splashes of colored pepper cubes, snappy cucumber and cooling lettuce under pesto mayo) reading an incredible little book (see right panel) that spoke to nearly all of the things I'm either currently going through or ever have. Seriously. So, despite a knee that's still protesting a bit (and influencing my foot to do the same), I think my 11 mile walk today was really, really good (I'm glad I didn't try to walk all the way back, though!) My hips were way too sore to walk back anyway, so I did take a bus, but still had to negotiate the hill from The Village to the house with my throbbing lower half and right knee, now screaming with every step. I made it home alright, though, and put some ice on the poor thing. Hopefully it will calm down for Amsterdam on Friday!