Next stop Hexham for Hadrian's Wall

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola

Hexham – voted best market town to live in by Country Life readers in 2005 and I’m sure they’d think the same again bar the staggering property prices and lack of homes with gardens – is a brilliant town. It’s very nearly the centre of Britain, though this honour is more truthfully held by its neighbour, Haltwhistle. You can even wine, dine and crash at the Centre of Britain Hotel there, see http://www.centre-of-britain.org.uk/. It has a station with links to Carlisle and Newcastle and loads of independent shops. I’ve already bought mohair socks and nettle cheese – both local specialities and eaten at the excellent Dipton Mill Inn which serves Hexhamshire beers and local cheeses, a genuine cheesey pub...

We arrived via the train station - the second oldest in England - but there's still the Abbey to look around, and Hadrian's Wall to walk (using the wittily named AD122 bus [clue: it's the same number as the year Hadrian visited Britain and commissioned the wall]) but we have had time to visit the Old Gaol http://www.tynedaleheritage.org/ which is the most disabled-access friendly museum I’ve ever been in despite being built in 1332. It had a lift taking you to the dungeons and then up two floors in a bid to explain why the Archbishop of York and later the March Wardens needed a purpose built jail – the first in England – in Hexham. Yet again it seems to hang on the activities of the Border Reivers doing reprisal raids and cattle thieving in the debatable lands.

Chasing Harry Potter

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola

Lola missed getting Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows one minute after midnight, but she was treated to a hardback copy on the first day it was out. We bought this from WH Smith in Berwick-on-Tweed (we couldn’t find any other bookshop in the town, but this may have been because it was raining so hard we lacked motivation). The shop assistants said they’d sold 450 copies that day – later the papers said more than a million CHECK copies had been sold on the first day. It’s an astonishing success for JK Rowling – and a great relief that she insisted on having FSC certified paper for her book and that… but I can’t tell you the ending can I?

Foot sore

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Pete

As they say in bad war films: “For you, ze walk is over!” In the best tradition of West Ham signings immediately getting injured, Pete May has succumbed to a pre-season triple whammy of foot ailments. My right foot is swollen, poisoned and maroon around the ankle. The doctor says I am suffering from cellulitus, athlete’s foot and a bruised and sprained ankle. Six weeks in sweaty Zamberlan boots has proved more than my plates of meat can handle.

Cellulitus is an infection of the foot that might have been caused by the athlete’s foot fungus infecting a mosquito bite or a rubbed spot from a dodgy sandal. It’s all been made worse by tripping over a hidden concrete step at Wooler youth hostel while wearing a heavy backpack, straining and bruising my ankle.

So now it’s a two week course of antibiotics and anti-fungal cream for my toes, wearing iffy Clark’s sandals with my foot propped on a stool, lying low in Hexham waiting for the big one - or at least a walk on Hadrian’s Wall - as I listen to the Hold Steady (our hosts are hipper than me). Nicola says it’s all down to my poor personal hygiene (surely washing once a year is enough?); I say our itinerary allayed to youth hostel mattresses would have had the SAS on antibiotics by now. Travel is inherently dangerous; both the girls have had tonsillitis, while Nicola is suffering from a persistent “productive cough” ever since our four days loitering within tents by a flooded Ullswater.

And how does anyone in the Scottish Borders ever get treated? On Saturday and Sunday there were no doctors in Greenlaw, Coldstream or Duns, while on Monday the entire Scottish NHS declared a public holiday and closed all its surgeries. Even the pharmacy was closed. The only appointment for Tuesday was at 2.30 and while we were waiting in Duns we noted that the café was closed because the owner had been taken to hospital and the pub was shut due to flooding. Forget Nashville; all the ingredients for a perfect country song can be found trying to find treatment for a septic ankle in Greenlaw.