And a day late posting as we’re realising that one day away from walking is not really enough. We need one day to rest and recover our aching legs. Then we could spend a second day doing all the things we needed to do like book a clinic appointment for rabies jabs; tweak the next 6 days’ routes to avoid dodging cars; phone ahead to our last BnB to ask if we can get champagne delivered there; review the cash flow spreadsheet for the loft conversion and contact at least three tradespeople to keep it on track; wash our clothes; make a short video to introduce ourselves to our fellow overland travellers in October and catch up with a friend. This friend is lovely, obviously, and every time I speak to her she is always threatening to travel somewhere. Finally, when I spoke to her yesterday she was actually in an airport at the start of an amazing trip. I can’t wait to hear how she gets on.

As we were staying at Mark’s mum’s house we were also able to eat home cooked food which was wonderful. Spaghetti puttanesca in the evening was eaten so quickly there was no time to photograph it. This mountain of vitamins and fibre for lunch was fabulous though, after all the saturated fat we’ve had so far.

As far as resting was concerned, we watched blue tits and squirrels fight over peanuts in the rain

and did some analysis of our walk so far.

Interestingly, although our pace has dropped slightly over time, the correlation between days since we started and speed is not significant. We tend to walk at 4.5km per hour, but elapsed time for any day including rest breaks, photos or pharmacy shopping for paracetamol and blister plasters brings us to 4km per hour. We’ve had long days that have been relatively fast paced and shorter routes that have taken forever dodging cars.

Some of our Strava elevation profiles look identical, but you can tell where they’re from by the scale on the y axis. If it goes over 400m it’s Scotland, below and it’s England. We then wondered if there is a way of showing at a glance, which are the hardest routes. They’re not always the ones with the highest single hill in them, they may be ones that have gone repeatedly up and down for miles. So we then calculated the ascent per km for each day. It turns out the worst days were along Loch Ness and Loch Lomond, the latter specifically including the stretch that tried to kill me. These two routes have more than 20m of ascent for every km walked. I can’t wait for Cornwall and our last day when the pretty coastal route has more than 40m ascent per km.

We ended our rest day eating far too much chocolate and drinking far too much wine, thanks to Mark’s mum’s generosity. A great way to set us up for the stretch of 6 days until our next rest day. 

Distance – to and from the kitchen, living room and our bedroom, with aching muscles: too embarrassingly short to Strava, felt too long for aching legs.