Putting One Foot In Front Of The Other: From Land's End to John O'Groats

Today I planned my own route and it was almost all new to me - a lovely saunter through some woods with the Gower Way, a jaunt along the coast with the Wales Coast Path, and a swim through a marsh. Wait, what? Yes, in my infinite wisdom, in order to join one bit of the Gower Way to one bit of the Wales Coast Path, I plotted a route via footpaths across some fields which, on arrival, turned out to be a quagmire of knee-deep mud. That's a very specific depth of mud you've mentioned there, Louise. Yes, it is, because that's how far up my walking trousers it got at the worst.  And, yes, I once again had the joy of walking about 14 miles in soaking wet socks and muddy ankles - but this time, I kept them on until I got back to the car, and the dead sheep came afterwards.  This time, an actual dead sheep moulting all over the field, rather than a skeleton, bringing the total number of dead sheep encountered on walks in Wales to three. Other than this boggy low point, I ...

"Only eighteen miles?" I hear you cry, "that's not very far compared with your last two walks!" Fear not, I have not suddenly become sensible or moderate.  I just thought that perhaps I should walk long distances on two or more consecutive days at least once  before I leave (3 weeks from today) and perhaps it was not wise to make each of those days 24-milers.  So instead today was 18.49 and tomorrow will be a very moderate 19.87.  I'm sure you'll agree that's much more sensible. I've now walked over 150 miles in training, which is more than 10% of the distance from Land's End to John O'Groats (by my route), so that's exciting. Today was a gloriously sunny day, which explains why I have a headache and a slowly-developing sunburn (despite the suncream I so carefully applied before leaving).  It also explains why there were quite so many other people out - a large number of whom lacked the basic good manners to say 'hello' ...

This morning I set off on a walk which the OS app assured me was 22.79 miles, with a pack which weighed 10.5kg when I put it into the back of my car.  I think that was with the water and food and so on in it, because when I weighed it just now it had come down to 7.6kg. A note: in order to achieve this weight, I carried an extra 2L bottle of water all day.  Spoilers: I'm never doing that again. A further note: I was beginning to be quite worried about the accuracy of the distance measurements on the OS maps app, but I just plotted the route I actually walked with my usual attention to detail as far as wibbliness goes, and OS reckons it's 23.22miles which is close enough for me.  However, something is very off about my time calculations: Naismith's, on the information I had before the walk: 9 hours Naismith's, on the route I just plotted: 9h40 OS: 7h20 Actual time it took me: 6h22 That is quite a big difference.   Thankfully in the right direction! Anyway...

On Wednesday last week, I set off on a 21-mile walk which, thanks to the minor inaccuracies in the route plotted on the OS maps app, was actually 24 miles.  An error of 12.5% is a little alarming when I'm in the process of plotting a nearly-1200-mile walk.  I'm choosing to believe, however, that this particular route-planner was less particular about the accuracy of their waypoints than I am.  I did also take a few wrong turns and park my car not at the start of the walk.  I'm hopeful. So I went for a nice little wander starting with Cefn Bryn, which is a feature of every Gower peninsula walk over 15 miles because it runs right down the middle and gives you pretty views to everywhere.  It prompted a realisation, however, that my least favourite words in the route-writers' vocabulary are "saddle" and "muddy", the latter especially when combined with "particularly".  "Saddle" just implies that you have climbed something tall, and ...