The day started really well, because, you know: beautiful people, coffee and porridge with fruit, nuts and seeds in it is a combination I could stick with all day. We were really glad we decided to come this way rather than via Taunton. However, we had to leave the fabulous friends we stayed with last night and head on up into the hills. 

The photos do not do the walk up there, or the view for 40 miles in every direction, justice. 

On the way up we discussed how we are both now impatient to run the last, short day in the sun along the Cornish coast, but the other 8 days walking we could barely care less about now. We’ve replotted nearly all of them and they are now all 30km+. We feel like we’ve walked on every terrain now and it’s going to take something really special for the aching feet to be worth it.

We’re both really looking forward to a rest day in Plymouth seeing our youngest son and an evening with my aunt and uncle in Cornwall. Again, the rest of the evenings in random BnBs, we have seen so many now, are not likely to surprise us with their awesomeness.

So we did feel almost as down as the path itself as we walked away from the Quantock hills, although it did start well with a crazy mushroom. This prompted Mark to go down an internet rabbit hole about how poisonous mushrooms actually kill you. Apparently, in 2008, the Horse Whisperer author, Nicholas Evans mistook deadly webcap mushrooms for porcini in Scotland, served them in parsley butter to his family and together with three family members ended up on kidney dialysis for the rest of his life until he received a transplant from his daughter.   

For quite a while after that we walked on a tiny road that could have been lovely were it not for the fact it was clearly used as a rat run and had a couple of key features:

We did have the advantage of a human “canary in the mine” for a while…..

….but when he had to walk back down the hill to navigate round two vans trying to pass each other, we decided firm action was called for.

At the next pub, the quite glorious Martlet Inn, we grabbed a bag of pork scratchings and a pint of cider each and studied the route.

1100 calories and 1.5km better off than before, we reached the canal refreshed in the early evening light. 

One more pair of gloves hanging jauntily by the railway line and we arrived at the Waterloo Cross Marston Inn.

Speaking of not being surprised by their awesomeness, the first thing we discovered was that our dinner reservation online had not translated into a physical reservation (someone scribbling in a book) and so we were seated at a high table with normal height chairs, not bar stools. When we pointed out that no one could eat at a table level with their neck, we were moved, thankfully to one that was also less sticky than a table coated in pritt stick. At our new table, we ordered via the QR code app which bears no resemblance whatsoever to stock levels in the pub. So 5 minutes later we got a refund of the gin, the whisky, one pint of cider and a tomato soup, because they had none of these available. We only found out they had only one tomato soup left because they came to the table with two leek and potato soups first. None of it is worth a photo and don’t get me started on the ensuing  conversation about the lack of a quality process (Janet) and how the ordering and stock level systems should be connected (Mark).

We’ve survived the rest of dinner and are foolishly navigating the QR code and ordering app one last time before heading off to bed. 

Distance – 34.4km which is ironically what it was supposed to be, but we also managed to cut out at least 1.5km. No one wins the sweepstake, not even our aching feet.