The Road goes ever on and on; Down from the door where it began;
Now far ahead the Road has gone; And I must follow, if I can;
Pursuing it with eager feet; Until it joins some larger way;
Where many paths and errands met; And whither then? I cannot say.

[JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings]

Sunday 25 March 2007

A Short Walk, Then a Shorter One

Earlier in the week, Husband expressed a desire to up the distance of our training walk this weekend to 25 or so miles. I was thinking more along the lines of 20 miles.

This morning, despite waking up with my cold more fully developed, I was still in the 20 mile mindset. Husband, with a couple less days than me to prepare for going away on Wednesday (as he’s away Monday/Tuesday), was feeling the pressure of too much to do and too little time and had shortened his ambitions to just a short walk of 10 miles.

Rather than walking separately, we started out together this morning and walked 9.25 miles, arriving back home at lunchtime. After lunch, and a quick change of jacket, I set back out for an extra 5 miles. I figured that that would still get me back home in time to cook a curry to be dehydrated overnight tonight and get the packing done, not to mention whipping up a roast dinner for tea tonight.

The routes taken were entirely uninteresting repetitions of parts of previous weeks’ walks. To be fair, the routes weren’t uninteresting in and of themselves; they were only rendered less interesting by the fact that we’ve walked them so many times in recent weeks.

But, the weather started out fair and turned to good (and the return home in the middle of the day allowed me to change my Velez for my Fuera in recognition of the improving weather), and repeated route or not, you can’t beat walking along under sunny blue skies.

The wind, which was quite noticeable in places, had a bit of a chill to it, but my new Mountain Cap (another item that I’m loving and wish I’d bought a long time ago) dealt with it admirably and without me overheating.

The mud of previous weeks had dried up (save for a couple of interesting spots by gates), so I remained dry-shod the entire day, even though I had opted for my Terrocs today. Husband tried out his RocLites for the first time, he started out thinking that they felt strange, but pushed for an opinion as I write this he says “They’re all right, aren’t they?”. To be fair, he is trying to work and so probably isn’t relishing my constant interruptions.

Best go and put that curry on, I guess.

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