Travel Blogger Says She Is Walking 200 Miles Across England Without Carrying a Suitcase, Sleeping in Hotels Every Night While Her Bag Moves Ahead of Her Each Morning

Left: cover still from a TikTok video by @@heleneinbetween. Right: A dirt country track lined with trees and white flowers (Unsplash photo by Kate Cullen).

@heleneinbetween, who goes by Helene Sula on TikTok, opens her video with a claim in text on screen: “This is Totally Normal in Europe and Doesn’t Even Exist in the USA.” What she means is inn to inn hiking. She says she is walking 200 miles across England on the Coast to Coast route and does not carry her belongings. Her caption places the video on day 9, a stretch from Keld to Reeth that she lists as 11 miles on the schedule and 14 miles on her feet.

Her daypack holds the basics, and she empties it onto a hotel bed to show them: water, a power bank, sunscreen, snacks, toilet paper and electrolytes. Everything else she packed, which she says was a lot, travels separately. “It’s moved every day from one hotel to the next by a Sherpa service,” she says. In the morning she leaves her suitcase at reception, and “it’s waiting for me at the next place before I even get there.”

The booking is the second half of the system. She says every night was reserved months in advance through a tour company, so she never has to think about where she will sleep. Her caption adds that the bookings cover “every bed, every bag transfer, and the maps,” so the only job left is walking. The video does not name the hotels she stays in.

Then she walks through the day. She goes from the stone village of Keld to Reeth through Swaledale, a valley she calls one of the most idyllic in the country, in the Yorkshire Dales. The frames show green hills, a trail beside a river with very large trees, old stone villages with pubs and a path lined with dry stone walls. At the village of Gunnerside she stops for fish and chips and a Diet Coke, and the afternoon ends with a stay she calls a five star hotel, where she gets “a hot shower, a bed, a proper dinner every single night.”

Her closing lines separate it from other kinds of trips. “This isn’t camping. It’s also not a vacation,” she says. “It’s a different kind of trip and one that I love.” Nine days in, she reports no aches, no pains and no blisters.

The caption explains how she found the format. She says she discovered inn to inn walking two years ago while living in Oxford. In a Cotswolds village she stopped a group of women in hiking boots and asked what they were doing, and they told her they were walking the Cotswold Way. She looked it up and found a ten day walk from inn to inn with hot dinners and a shower every night. “It ruined me, because I’ll never walk any other way,” she writes.

On the American side, she makes her own comparison. In her words, there are “a few small ones, but no bag transfer, and you’re sleeping in huts or campsites.” That is her account of what she found when she looked, not a survey of every trail in the United States, and the video does not name the routes she checked.

The Cotswold Way she mentions is an official route. According to the National Trail guidance on GOV.UK, it runs 102 miles (164 km) from Chipping Campden in the north to Bath in the south, and most walkers take around 7 to 10 days to complete it, which matches the ten days she describes. Her current walk is the Coast to Coast, which she gives as 200 miles across England.

Swaledale, where this day was set, is described by the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority as one of the most northerly dales in the national park, with “perhaps the wildest, most unspoilt scenery in the National Park.” The authority notes that Gunnerside takes its name from “Gunnar’s saetr,” a name given by Viking farmers over a thousand years ago, and that Reeth is a bustling village with shops, pubs and cafes. Those are the same stone villages and pubs she walks past in the video.

For a traveler thinking about copying the format, the video points to a few planning details. The suitcase goes to reception in the morning, so each day’s stop has to be a place with a front desk. Every night needs a confirmed bed, which she says she handled months ahead. And the daily distance matters, since her own caption shows a scheduled 11 mile day turning into 14 miles on a day she says she felt great.