Land’s End to John O’Groats

We’ve made it to Bristol (assuming you ignore our cheat). It is so good to be home and will be brilliant to have two consecutive days off.

Hopefully it will give our feet time to heal a bit more. We are hoping that it will mean Chloe’s foot will not continue to be painful when we start again. We will walk to Chepstow on Tuesday to start our Welsh leg. If we do find Chloe’s foot injury continues to be a problem then we will see what can be done.

As we are home I get to use my lovely computer and car which I have missed very much indeed.That means some more photos! (Yay!)

Yesterday we had a little crew of supporters who came and walked the whole 21 mile day with us. You will note that we are not wearing our big packs as they were kindly chauffered home for us in the morning (thanks mum). Jen and Simon actually walked 21 miles the day before with us as well. It was really good to have people with us.

We look forward to reading comments from anyone, esspecially from those who have joined us at some point. Generally we have found peoples’ comments on this blog are really good and we look forward to reading them whenever we get a chance.

Rather than write another 4000 words, here is its pictorial equivalent.

Yes we have already resorted to cheating. But before you cross our names from your Christmas card list in disgust let me explain…

I’ve hurt my foot. Now you may bebthinking something along the lines of “well, duh, if you’re stupid enough to try to walk hundreds of miles carrying heavy weights your feet will hurt” but this is no longer just sore feet. 80 miles ago it was just sore feet, I reached sore feet stage at about the 100 mile mark and we’re now 188.9 miles along. The ball of my right foot is now permanently swollen enough for every step ( or, more precisely, every other step) to have hurt for four days now. This has led to multiple other pains because I haven’t been walking properly. I possibly could make it to Bristol but I would almost certainly make it no further. We can’t just hang around for an extra day as we have booked about thirty bed and breakfasts in advance. So today we are going to be naughty and take the bus over to Street in the hope that an extra day off will get us back on track.
Paul is a bit foot sore as well but he could probably make it without the break. So there we go… Now you can get out that card list or alternatively you can pray for healing and for wisdom to know when we can keep on and when we’re doing proper damage.

In all seriousness we’re pretty disappointed to have to do things like this already but we swore that if we had to resort to pain killers to get us through every day we’d change plans. Maybe we’ll come back at the end and do this day properly.

In other news: the indications are that Paul has done very well in his degree. So it’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, apart from the foot issue we’re enjoying ourselves greatly.

We have made it to Tiverton. 164.3 miles done, we don’t want to think about how many still to go.

The last stretch since our last rest day has actually gone really quickly. We were both quite surprised when we realised that we has a day off rather than desperately waiting for it. On Saturday we were joined by Jenny Sisley which was great for us. Somewhat unfortunately Jenny managed to pick a long day in the worst weather we’ve had yet. Our feet, which I thought were just getting tough enough to not cause too much trouble now, got very wet early on and so were not feeling great by the end of the day. 20 miles the next day were great and went quickly but left out feet slightly worse again. A final 16 miles with Lizzie yesterday finished of the stretch nicely.

Actually we thoroughly enjoyed the 3 days but our feet, esspecially Chloe’s were not on good terms with our shoes by yesterday evening. Hopefully the rest today will put us back in fine shape for the next bit.

We are surprised that we have made it this far with so little injury and thank God for providing practically and healing us every day. We are taking each day as it comes and not thinking too much about how far there is to go.

Thanks for all your comments, prayers and donations - they really mean a lot to us.

Hello! Below is how we looked the day before  we started and now here we are on our second rest day…

So far we have walked 105.8 miles over 6 days climbing 49 stiles, passing through 34 gates (and only one was locked!) and 7 kissing gates, slipping across 4 cattle grids… We’ve stopped to get things out of our shoes 12 times, had countless stings (we were in fact counting but on the first three days we walked through so many fields of nettles our legs were just covered). We’ve walked down footpaths that have come to insurmountable obstacles about 53 000 times and walked down useful footpaths about 4 times. We’ve had 1 day of rain and 5 of sunshine, been stranded on open moorland for about 3 hours, been outside for about 58 hours and done at least 6 extra miles on top of the 105.8 by going the wrong way a couple of times and by detours along the aformetioned pointless footpaths. We’ve seriously thought about giving up 0 times and semi-seriously possibly once. We’ve text Pete Osborne 14 times, found out 1 set of degree results, acquired just the 1 blister (and interestingly that was on my left thumb), 1 muscle injury, and two swollen joints (again, interestingly these were the two lower joints of my left little finger). We’ve read 8 chapters of John and had conversations about eschatological tension, the nature of judgement and where Jesus went after the crucifixion among other things. We’ve purposefully not thought about how much more we’ve got to walk about 35 times a day each…

Here is a picture of the view from lovely Bodmin Moor…

DON’T TALK TO US ABOUT BODMIN MOOR. We spent almost all of yesterday wandering around in knee length grass and gorse trying to find away off the moor. It was a beautiful, beautiful place and I’m sure if you get to know it is all very lovely but if you are trying to get from one side to the other and don’t know the place at all you might as well close your eyes and change direction evry ten steps and see what happens. We never actually got lost. Frustratingly we could see exactly where we were at all times but we just couldn’t find a way to leave. Eventually at 5pm we managed to fight our exhausting way to the one single path on the whole moor and stagger down to Jamaica Inn where we were rescued by the lovely Jordan and James. It was kind of worth it to have a wonderful dinner at a very discounted rate at The Royal Standard in Mary Tavy.

So that was our one day of fun. The rest of the time things have been going swimmingly. I did have a strain in my calf muscle but that was put to rights (well almost, it still kinda hurts a bit) by hot water bottles, arnica tablets and cream (all supplied by our hostess at a wonderful B&B in St. Tudy). All other aches and pains are just to be expected from the effort of walking 8-10 hours a day, day after day after day…

So we’re relaxing today and then we are being joined by Jenny who has foolishly agreed to walk one day with us tomorrow. We also have Lizzie and Lucy joining us before our next rest day which will be cool. We’re enjoying each other’s company very much and only in the last couple of days have resorted to word games to get through the miles but we do feel a little bit in a bubble it will be refreshing to get a bit of the real world into the bubble with us! It’s meant to rain a lot tomorrow though…it always rains when Jenny joins us. I’ll try and get her to write a reply to the post when she returns home to let you know how it went!

Every day is like a little mini-drama so we could tell you loads of stuff but I think I’ll leave it there as I imagine things that seem interesting to is after 100 miles of walking are probably very very dull in reality! Please do post replies and e-mail us it’s all so encouraging. Below are a few more pictures of the many we have to “interest” you. More to come when we get to Bristol…

“Then your light will shine like the dawn and your wounds will quickly heal. Your God will walk before you and the glory of the LORD will protect you from behind.) - Isaiah 58:8 -

Well we’ve arrived at our first rest day in Truro! Hooray! We’ve walked about 55 miles so far over three days and it’s been brilliant. The weather has been pretty much perfect-except for the 91% humidity yesterday.

We’ve had a few small run-ins with crazy masked horses, fields of inquisitive llamas and many many stinging nettles but it’s always worth it when we get to our next bed and breakfast! Not a single blister has emerged so far, in fact we have nothing worse than sore feet. God has been really good to us.

Other random news includes Paul discovering a whole new pocket in his coat and me cracking the screen of by phone by dropping it on a rock during a drinks break yesterday…luckily it still works. We’re finding ourselves particularly engaged by the place names, our favourite being Water-ma-Trout.

Think that’s it for now… Feel free to contact us or leave a reply!

What a day!

It literally couldn’t have been better weather. Land’s End and the coast are beautiful and looked amazing in the bright sunlight, yet the gentle sea breeze and occasional cloud meant we didn’t get too hot even when scrambling up and down cliff path’s with 17 kg packs.

We both agreed it was the best day’s walk either of us has has ever had which is the perfect start to the next 3 months! We also enjoyed hacking our way through some very densly overgrown paths for a few miles and have plenty of nettle stings to prove it. Photo opportunities were rife when walking through the village of Paul (you can probably imagine).

Finally we arrived in Penzance at the most wonderful and friendly bed and breakfast you could imagine. It is called The Lynwood and we highly recommend it if you’re in Penzance. Perfect! God is good.

If you are in or around Bristol on the 28th of June, please join us!

We have arranged several meeting points along our walk into Bristol that day so you can do 3, 8 or 21 miles depending on your preference (and fitness).

More info is available on the Bristol Walk page on this blog.

See you there!

The next three days are all we have left to put our lives in order and get things sorted before we set off.

It seemed like a nice idea to start our own blog rather than just updating the site, so here it is.

This way you can leave us comments and make us feel a little more in-touch with humanity.

We’ll be setting off on Thursday morning and Friday will be the first day of the walk. Then we walk until the end of August. Easy.