Day 2: La Pulente to La Falaise

This was yesterday's final step count, according to Tim's FitBit:

Needless to say, we were a little bit tired and stiff this morning  But we didn't get up too early, heading down to the hotel breakfast buffet around 9 and then making our way to St Helier bus station on time to catch a bus at 10.10. The weather in St Helier this morning was nowhere near as sunny as yesterday, but it seemed dry at least.

The bus took us back to the stop at La Pulente, where we'd finished our walk last night, so that we could pick up the route from the same point.

It was just before 11am when we got off the bus and started walking. The first part of our route took us on a path alongside the beach.

We could see the lighthouse we'd walked past yesterday at La Corbière in the distance behind us.

The path we were following was quite sandy, taking us across the dunes.

We were making our way around the edge of a large bay.

We realised after a while that there was some sort of racing going on, on the sand below us. First we saw motorcycles, then a group of cars were doing laps in the sand.

It seemed to be an official race because there was an ambulance there in case there were any emergencies, but no idea what it was.

There were some beautiful purple flowers as we walked along the dunes.

Every so often we would pass bunkers and towers; remnants of the Nazi occupation of Jersey in WWII.

The instructions in the guidebook told us to keep close the sea wall.

Sometimes, in the absence of another clear path, we ended up having to walk on top of it.

I wasn't very impressed though when we'd been doing that for a while, then the sea wall had this sudden drop down which we had to negotiate.

The next part of the sea wall was quite rocky and a bit more difficult to walk on.

So it was a bit of a relief when the next part of the route led us onto a road, even if the road was taking us up to the top of these hills.

There were some lovely views of the bay we'd just walked around as we began to climb higher.

The higher we got, the better the views became.

We could see we really had come a long way!

The path had led us to a series of military structures at a place called Battery Moltke.

The bunkers and towers here were built by the German army during the occupation of Jersey.

As we were looking at one of the towers, we realised we could see another island in the distance behind it.

Consulting the map revealed that this was Guernsey - wow  

In general, the coastal views from up here were fantastic.

It was quite windy at times and the water was really fierce around the rocks at the bottom of the cliffs.

The path continued to lead us around the cliff tops...

...eventually taking us to the ruins of Grosnez Castle.

The castle was built in the 14th century and reaching this point meant we had now completed our walk along the western coast of Jersey.

The footpath sign confirmed that we were now joining the north coast path.

The northern coast seemed like it was going to be pretty scenic too.

Although it wasn't the sunniest of days, the sea was a beautiful shade of blue here.

After continuing along the coast for a while, we stopped at a place called Plémont to get some lunch at a seaside cafe.

There was a sign warning us to beware of the seagulls, but luckily none came near!

From Plémont we had less than 5 miles to go to complete our route for the day. Unfortunately, we did have to restart the route by climbing a staircase in the side of the cliff above the cafe.

It was tiring, but the view was lovely.

As we reached the top of the climb we caught sight of a rather unusual sculpture.

There were two enormous puffins depicted here. Sadly we didn't see any real puffins!

We kept following a little coastal path...

...with some great views of the sea.

Eventually our route turned more inland and we walked past countless fields of potatoes. Tim pointed out that Jersey is famous for them, so it did make sense that there were so many!

We still got the odd glimpse down to the sea.

The final couple of miles of today's walk were inland, following a small country lane.

It felt like we were in the middle of nowhere when we got to the road with the bus stop from which I was hoping we could catch a bus back to St Helier. But the bus did arrive at exactly the time scheduled and within half an hour or so we were back in the centre of town

Today's route was officially supposed to be 11.75 miles. My FitBit says just over 30,000 steps and 14 miles, so it's been another long day!