LEJOG Prep

Just a quick update:

Countdown
All being well (touching wood, fingers crossed and all that good stuff), at this point in two weeks time we’ll be curled up in our sleeping bag having made it through the first day of our LEJOG adventure.

The two week timescale really is starting to concentrate the mind on all of the things that I’ve still got to do. At some point in the next two weeks that concentration of the mind may well turn to panic…

Training
It’s probably a bit late in the day to be calling any outing a training walk, but we did make it out for a short and quick jaunt over some of the Malvern Hills this afternoon. It was our first outing in the area, and we didn’t pick a bad day for it: the sunny intervals seemed to be longer than the cloudy bits and the views were superb.

The only fly in the ointment was the wind. It was a bit breezy up on that ridge; breezy enough to cause quite a lot of staggering along (although a good test of the new Montane Featherlite). Alas, despite digging through my pack I found that I didn’t happen to have my anemometer with me, so I still don’t know quite how windy it needs to be to send me staggering sideways.

Industry
It’s been an industrious evening. Not only has more food completed its dehydrating cycle (81 meals done now), but Husband has been busy making pot cosies and I’ve been busy with the sewing machine.

My sleeping bag liner is now suitable for a 5’5” person, rather than a 6’5” person (as a side-effect it lost 50g in the process).

Then, just because I had the machine out, I thought that I’d make a new sit mat, so in addition to my concertina closed-cell mat that I’ve been using for the last couple of years, I now have a home-fashioned doubled-up-foam-backed-silver-foil one. It loses out on cushioning when compared with the closed-cell one but it gains on weight and, more importantly, packability.

The sewing machine is still out. There are still trousers to be altered, gloves to be repaired and promotional 'Big Walk' panels to be sewn, but those are jobs for another evening.