5th April 2010 Walking from Goring By Sea to Lancing (via the beach)

Sunday 4th April 2010 saw me feeling very depressed. So I brought forward a plan that I was going to use sometime in the future, and the following morning, Easter bank holday Monday, I set out under a grey sky to walk along the beach from Goring By Sea. As my train headed south the sky brightened up a bit, and the grey had given away to white by the time I reached Goring By Sea railway station. On the map below the green dot marks the start of my walk at Goring By Sea railway station. The name is a misnomer - it is hardly by the sea, and in fact it is about a mile away !

This walk set a new record for my walking. As the statistics show, I walked 7.13 miles, and that only includes the walk from station to station and doesn't include any walking getting to the start point, or the walking involved getting home again from the finish point. I did it almost non-stop, but the blue dot marks the place where I stopped for a beer at the 6.7 mile point. The software says I burnt up nearly 1100 calories on this walk, and that was very useful besides all the fresh air to clear some of the negative energy circulating in my brain.

After walking for practically a mile through boring residential streets I was very happy to leave the road and walk the last few hundred yards through this small wood before I came out onto the sea front.

It's not easy to photograph, but most of the track through the woods was extremely muddy. In some ways it made things more interesting - more like a real ramble.

This is the view looking west towards Littlehampton from the beach at Goring By Sea

It was low tide, very low tide when I arrived on the beach. Out beyond the end of the groynes the beach was very rocky. Around the high water mark was shingle. Between the two was some decent sand.

A sport that seems (to me) to be growing in popularity is kite surfing. With a medium strong wind blowing there were plenty of people out with their kites all along the sea between Goring and Worthing.

The man pictured above holding his friends kite sounded like he was French.

I hope this pipe was just discharging rainwater runoff !

By the time I reached about halfway of my long walk the sky was really blue and it was warming up nicely. With the weather looking unusually excellent for a bank holiday Monday the holiday makers started coming out in force. I chose a brief quiet spell to take the picture above, but it was getting quite busy around here, and even more so a couple of hundered feet further along by Worthing pier.  When I first started out I thought I might finish off my walk at Worthing station, but I was enjoying myself and in a rush of masochism I decided to carry on and push myself to the limit. I will confess I didn't really push myself to the limit in the end, but decided that if I could make it to Lancing station that would be good enough. After walking for 6.7 miles I found myself outside the pub where I had a cooling pint of beer the last time I walked to Lancing. So I had a beer and a sit down for 15 minutes.  It is surprising how quickly I seem to recover after such a short break (although any more than that and I would probably sieze up solid !). After that refreshing stop I found the going to be quite easy for the last bit to the station, and taking my walk up to 7.13 miles.  The last time I wrote abut Lancing (25th September 2009) I remarked that the high street was typical of a country town with the type of shops you don't tend to see so much in urban areas. What I didn't realise at the time was that many of these shops were all owned by the same company as the composite picture below shows.