England – Focusing on Putting One Foot in Front of the Other
June 3
After another really cold night, we woke to a beautiful sunny morning. The day continued to be gorgeous and warm. We decided to start with our running shoes and carry our boots because the thought of putting on our hiking boots over our blisters was too much to bear. The running shoes felt so much better, at first. They later created their own hot spots and blisters.
Sure enough, we started with the steep hill that we knew we would have to tackle. I thought we must have climbed most of the hills the previous day but, boy, was I ever wrong. The third day was, by far, our toughest day. The hills kept coming and coming. And they remained steep and long. There were some alternative trails around lower parts of hill, which looked easier, but we didn’t take them. They were longer routes, we were developing more blisters with every footstep, and we wanted to just go the shortest route, which ended up being the steepest. The views really were beautiful, and the sense of accomplishment after climbing each hill was huge, though short-lived when we saw the next hill to conquer.
There was no food on the hike this day. We again relied on protein bars and mixed nuts that we brought from home. The candy we bought from the camp store helped carry us through some difficult moments. Between the physical labor and leg/foot and shoulder pain (from the backpacks), the mental struggle, the lack of real food, and the warm day, we were spent at the end.
With a couple hours left to hike, I tried to change my shoes into my hiking boots because of the new blisters that were forming and popping. But, walking just 30 minutes was torture and my feet didn’t “numb up” as they had earlier. I had to change back to my running shoes.
The directions to campgrounds weren’t ever very obvious; we kind of had to guess and put the pieces of the puzzle together. After hiking that long, we weren’t thinking clearly and directions to this particular campsite was a little more vague than the others. Within shouting distance from camp, which was uphill and around a corner so I didn’t know how close it was, I stopped and borrowed the boy’s quote and told Mike I was “dying.” Mike had to put on a confident act, like he knew where he was going (which we both knew was fake because he’d never been there before) but it totally helped me.
We were camping in a park in Wall village. After finding our tent, we went to the pub. It was only okay. This was twice now that we’d requested a glass of water with our beer, and the water was ignored. We noticed that locals rarely drank water with their meals. After a rest at the camp, we returned for dinner, which did not improve the pub. We were able to order a burger, but it wasn’t quite what we wanted.
Our feet and calves were really sore and we strongly questioned whether we should continued. I had never quit anything before but this was nearly double the distance from what we planned. We were hiking, on average, 20 miles a day. We decided to wait until the next morning to decide whether to continue, mostly because it would have been really hard to get a taxi out of there and there was no wifi. A lady hiking with us commiserated over the tough route that day, and we both felt better after talking to her. We didn’t tell her we thought about stopping. That evening, we decided to continue on and finish the route.
