Day 3 – Feet Don't Fail Me Now - 22 Kilometres

Today was a day that my feet decided to reject the rest of my body. Buoyed up by our achievements of the previous two days, we had no hesitation in taking on a walk of 22 kilometres through endless rolling countryside and lovely Franken villages, that would end in the beautiful old town of Wertheim. Unfortunately, after about 18 Kilometres, my feet felt as if they had been cooked in a deep fat fryer. Everything from my ankles down hurt like hell, all in subtlety different ways.

Top of the list were my always troublesome Archilles Tendons. I always knew, from my previous experience, that they could be my biggest physical challenge and could turn out to be...well...my Archillies Heel. After two trouble free days, they decided to remind me of their existence. With immense patience and encouragement form Doris, I managed to hobble a few Kilometres, before taking a break to have a serious think, some 4 kilometres from our destination. A rest and a change of footwear rejuvenated me but the right tendon is very sore. Hopefully, it will, tomorrow, having reminded of its existence and its need to be consulted about my plans, will fade gracefully into the background until I, again, have the temerity of challenge its authority.

By the way, if I see a little obsessed by weights and measures in these early entries then please forgive me. My only excuses is that 12 Kilograms still feels heavy and 20 Kilometres still feels a reasonably long way to carry it. Hopefully that will change as our stamina and fitness improves. Hopefully.

Day 2 – Urban Hill Climb - 30 Kilometres

We are tired – really tired.

Most of this morning and early afternoon was spent negotiating our way through the urban landscape of Wuertzburg. Now, as urban landscapes go, Wuertzburg is pretty good, well beautiful actually, but when you want to get up a hill and all of the streets run across rather than up, then it can be a tad frustrating. So this morning was spent pounding pavements, with many wrong turns, mostly up hill. The early part of this afternoon was tracking dual carriageways, that even in Wuertzburg are not very pretty, to try to escape the city. Eventually we managed to hit greenery, weaving our way through hillside after hillside of vineyards.

Then, having started at 8:30 and achieved out target distance by 14:30 we had a difficult choice. The next village likely to have accommodation was nearly another 10 kilometres away - way beyond what we should be trying it achieve on our second day, in temperatures still around 30 degrees Celsius. After a long hard think, not fuelled by alcohol, we decided to press on.

Our target Gasthof turned out to have been closed for some time, so we sat down for half an hour, contemplated the options and pressed on for another 2 kilometres, limping into Uettingen at 18:45, from where I now write - 50% further than we ever intended to walk at this stage.

Did I mention that we are tired? Does it show?

Day 1 - Generosity - 22 Kilometres

As we were let down by a connectivity provider, we do not have a regular connection to the Internet. We are, therefore, going to be reliant on wireless hotspots and friendly people that we meet, to be able to make future posts. Consequently, this and future posts are likely to lag behind events and be batched up, with multiple days in single posts.

We have completed our first day. We set off at 8:30, arriving at our destination of Bergtheim around 16:00, having walked 22 Kilometres on a hot cloudless day, in temperatures that nudged above 30 degrees Celsius. We are both really proud of ourselves. Self-doubt about our ability to cope has not been vanquished but it has certainly had a poke in the eye. Doing it day after day is, of course, another matter but now we know we can walk that sort of distance,on a hot day, carrying over 12 Kilograms and that was a big hurdle to clear.

It was tough but we coped well. Tomorrow may well turn out to be tougher, as we will start with the aches and pains with which we finished today. And we do have some very decent aches and pains - I will not bore you with the details.

Apart from the achievement for ourselves, the striking feature of today was other people's generosity towards us.

The generosity of my mother, Lily, who despite fighting lung cancer, being effectively housebound and seeing her only close family support disappear for two months, wished us well with genuine, warm sincerity – who said "don't worry about me" and meant it.

The generosity of Ulrike, Doris's sister, who gave us her mobile 'phone, so that we could make calls within Germany, without exorbitant cross-border charges.

The generosity of Gisela, Doris's sister, who drove a long distance with her two small children to see us off this morning, having arranged our accommodation for this evening and then put herself on standby to pick us up if we needed help.

The generosity Petra, Doris's friend, who got on her bicycle to intercept us and wish us well, a few kilometres into our journey, and then cycled ahead to the next town and back, to bring us back a much needed brunch, for which, needless to say, she would not let us pay.
And last but certainly not least, the generosity of Brigit te, our host for this evening, who has not only provided us with fine food and drink, who has not only trusted us with the run of her lovely home while she is out at a birthday party but has also given us her own bed to sleep in for the night.

Heartfelt thanks to all of them for making today a very special day.

Reality bites

Tomorrow will be the first day of our walk. It arrives with two sobering pieces of reality.

The first is the weight of our fully packed rucksacks. Although Doris's is slightly smaller in terms of volume, our respective packs both come in at just over 11 Kilograms. For the Americans and older Brits, that is a shade over 24 pounds, or 1.7 Stones. Gulp!

I have to admit to mild panic when I first discovered this. Since then, I have been engaging in what I believe is known as “self-talk”, telling myself that it doesn't feel too bad, as I stride manfully between train, 'plane, escalator and car. But tomorrow there will be no train, 'plane, escalator or car – just Shanks's Pony.

Add to this, the fact that our first offered accommodation is something like 25 kilometres away - more than our average target daily of 20 kilometres. Doris has gotten royally sick of me bleating on about how we are not fit and that we need to use the early part of the journey to get fit. I am sorry to mention it again, and in public, but the distance will be a stretch for our very first day.

We do have the option of a lift if we come up short. I, however, fear that if we do so, we may not start at the exact point that we left off. This, in my unreasonable and purist mind, feels like cheating. This despite the fact that we will have to take a detour when we restart that is equivalent of the distance “skipped”. I am trying to re-frame - honest!

In actual fact, we both know that our mutual stubbornness, when it comes to goals, will drive us to want to complete the full distance. But now comes the second sobering piece of reality. Tomorrow, it will 30 degrees centigrade and sunny. Double gulp! But there is worse to come. It is forecast to stay at around that level until Tuesday when the rain comes.

I think this makes it appropriate mention our pact. We have agreed that if either of us keels over and dies of a heart attack, the survivor will not carry on in memory of the other. He or she will recognise what a stupid idea it was and travel home first class. This, obviously, started as a joke but now prompts me to ask that, if you have a god, then please offer up a prayer to him, her or them – I think we may need it.

Last night at home

and I have done everything I was able to think of. The rest will just have to sort itself out.

Gary already mentioned my pretty laid back attitude to packing. So it comes quite as a surprise to me that I am packed and ready to go. No more last minute panic tomorrow - how will I cope?? But I must say that I am not the master in leaving the packing to the last minute. That honour goes to an old friend of mine. She took that endorphin producing last minute rush to new heights when she realised around midnight, whilst packing, that she could not find her passport. She was booked on a morning flight to Japan and amazingly she did go on that flight - with an emergency passport that was issued by the mayor of her town in the middle of the night. The mayor was called out of bed by her very resourceful and persuasive husband. He opened the office and issued her with the desired travel documents. Do not try this in any large city or anywhere in the UK!

I am still in awe - anybody can pack last minute, but a new passport less than 12 hours before departure? So you see, me being worried about being packed the night before is completely valid. It's a slippery slope. What ever next I ask!

Our lives for the next two months...more or less...or is that more?

We will be departing the day after tomorrow and today Doris, true to her usual relaxed approach to travel, bought her rucksack and most of her clothes for the trip. I, true to my usual uptight approach, purchased everything a couple of months ago. The completion of our “kit out” provided a great opportunity, so I thought, to line up all of our stuff, give or take a few items, in front of our respective rucksacks, thus demonstrating the meagre possessions that will be our lives for the next two months.

The blue rucksack is mine and the red one belongs to Doris. As you may be able to see, and much to Doris's amusement, the pile of stuff in front of the blue rucksack is a little (sic) larger than that in front of the red one. This is made a smidgen more embarrassing by the fact that I berated Doris for buying a smaller rucksack than she advised me to buy because she preferred the colour of the smaller one.

Now I know that I usually take too much when we go away, “just in case”, but I really did think that this time, with my rapier-like purchases of ultra-light, ultra-compact and ultra-expensive walking gear, I had got it down to the absolute minimum – obviously not.

I will have to reconsider. And that includes my copy of the new translation of Don Quixote, specially purchased to last the trip at close to 1,000 pages but unfortunately weighing in at just under a kilogram.

I will be staying with my mum tomorrow night, so tonight will be my last night at home, in my own bed, for a couple of months. Hardly going off to war but a little bit emotional nonetheless for a hopeless romantic like me.

Medication Time

Jo send us this card which totally cracks us up:

every morning and evening I form an orderly cue and Gary counts out the pills. We just collated all the pills we need to take on the trip and it is quite a pile.

Gary takes a cocktail of drugs for his fibrillation ‘troubles’ (he never fails to mention that Tony Blair was a fellow sufferer) and I for a hyperactive thyroid and associated symptoms. I am really resenting the fact that within months we went from nothing to both of us having to take medication every day and especially that we have to drag them along on our trip.

Luckily it is likely that both our symptoms will disappear and we will be able to discontinue the drugs in a year or so.

Major Donation

On Thursday I met back up with a group of lovely people I used to get up for at 6 am every Thursday morning for about three years. We were a networking group and for some reason this group had good karma from the very beginning. I made some great connections and feel all warm and fuzzy about all of them. Hi guys, I had a lovely evening and I understand Warren is going to host the next get together in his beautiful garden.

Over the years we also managed to accumulate quite a bit of surplus in the group's bank account. Of that a (surprisingly) modest amount went on our dinner and the rest is going to be shared between two charities. One is Medicines sans Frontiers and we are proud to add about £ 1200 to our sponsorship - that is £ 1 for every kilometer we are going to walk. Gary and I are very grateful!!

Elaine, please hit the 'donate now' button just up and to the right, follow the instructions (I know that is a challenge, but do try) and make us look really impressive please.

After all we have not walked a mile yet and we have already had some very faithful and trusting souls donate so much money. You bullies - more reasons so we can't chicken out.

Anybody else who feels like piling the pressure on us? Hit the button that says:

D O N A T E N O W

Bring it on.......................................

Our preparation

In my last blog entry, I said I had realised that I had prepared for walking but that I had not prepared for not walking. Doing versus being. As a consequence, a lot of people have asked me what we have done to prepare. My confident answer is that I have bought a rucksack, over-priced walking clothing, two heavy books to read and a relatively lightweight notebook PC.

Doris is slightly less well prepared, having purchased maps for the German part of our journey and publicised our journey to her network of friends and contacts but not yet having purchased a rucksack or walking gear. And, oh yes, we did three walks of about seven and one half miles where we shared the load of a single weighted rucksack.

If you know me rather than Doris, you probably think I am being flippant and have omitted the rigorous training regime and day by day plan, with accommodation all pre-booked. Unfortunately, that is not the case and we may be setting out on the most ill-prepared expedition since Captain Scott took on the Antarctic (See “The Last Place" on Earth by Rolan Huntford).

I know I should be concerned by this but, actually, I am rather pleased. We have rationalised it thus: had we considered what we are taking on and tried to fully prepare in advance, we would never have contemplated doing it. In truth, I wish I was more physically prepared but apart from that, the principle of just starting to walk; doing so day after day, accepting and enjoying what comes along, is aligned with the idea of just being.

Much like, as my good friend Stephen pointed out, the character Caine in the 1970's TV show “Kung Fu”, with David Carradine, improbably cast as a Chinese Shaolin monk (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068823/). Except, of course, we'll have our PC, iPODs and being staying in nice comfy beds (we hope) in hotels, hostels and with friends. And I doubt that Caine got himself kitted out at The North Face from the looks of things.

Closed for business

I wrote my last invoice last week and now have nothing ahead of me for the next two months other than our journey.

None of my famous projects on the go in their various stages of 'incompleteness', nobody to talk to about future collaboration, no networking meetings, I said good bye to my Master mind group, no long ‘To Do’ lists actually they are supposed to be ‘Next Action’ lists (if I ever reach the for me seemingly unobtainable heights of GTD - Get Things Done heaven), no more telephone conferences booked……….

When the phone rings it is either somebody persistent from an Indian call centre (there has been a plethora of those lately – what is going on??) or it is a friend or family members making helpful statements like:

‘Not long now’

‘Do you now wish you had organise a luxurious beach holiday for Gary’s 50^th birthday’

‘Wow, that is quite a distance’

‘How is the training going?’

So like Gary said in his previous blog and my good friend Jo reiterated. This walk is not about ‘doing’, it is about ‘being’. Western education and life style leaves me ill prepared for just ‘being’. So we craftily build in some ‘doing’ things – like committing to keeping the blog up to date on this gorgeous thing of beauty:

And I am going to ponder the question how I can combine the things I love to do like craft & art, messing around with words, group coaching & training into one business that not only makes me happy but also turns a good profit. Is pondering ‘being’ or ‘doing’?????

The relativity of time

Our journey has been months in the future for so long that it came as shock to realise that we fly to Germany in just two weeks today. It feels as if there is still so much more preparation to do but I am just not quite sure what it is!

A couple of days after we leave, we will start our walk and life will be very different. We will be forever accompanied by our rucksacks, blisters and sore joints. We will have minimal changes of clothes and have no home comforts, such as a comfy chair in front of the television, a familiar bed with clean sheets and on-tap broadband. Food choices will be limited to meals in restaurants, bars, cafes and hotels, or to meals that we can assemble from cold ingredients such as bread, cheese and cold cuts of meat. An exception will be those occasions when someone offers us hospitality – no many so far. This will be our lives for two months.

Apart from the food choices, it is a liberating thought. All that we will need will be on our backs. Our lives stripped down to the bare essentials.

That includes, I am forced to admit, a new shiny red notebook pc, weighing just over one kilogram, purchased with the sole purpose of maintaining this blog. Well, OK, it will also allow me to play poker when we have a decent connection within range. And yes it will be useful to allow us to synchronise our iPODs, so that we can get all of those essential Podcasts. Did I mention that our iPODs are part of the bare essentials that we have stripped down to? But the laptop and the iPODs are the only real gadgets. The digitial camera is obviously an essential to document our trip and post pictures on the blog. And, after all, I did deprive myself of the lovely GPS, map on your wrist gizmo, in favour of the greater integrity of a protractor compass and maps. As I said, stripped down to the bare essentials.

Something I do not yet know is how we will spend our time when we are not walking. Our aim is to walk twenty Kilometres, or about fifteen miles, per day. This should take us about five to six hours which is a lot of walking day in, day out. But on the other hand, six hours is not a big chunk out of a day. If we started at, say 09:00 and broke for an hour at lunch, we would be finished walking by around 16:00. Then what? There is only such much reading one can do and only so many books that one can carry – the latest copy of Don Quixote is bloody heavy I can tell you. Buying replacement reading material in Germany will be easier for Doris than for I.

That reminds me of all the things I haven't prepared such getting the material together so that I can turn my novel into a screenplay, rather than carry the book that tells you how to write a screenplay! I now see that I have prepared for walking but not for not walking!

But hang on a minute isn't this, dare I say, a very Western attitude? The need to be doing things? The idea of a pilgrimage had its origins in Eastern, or more specifically Indian, traditions. In those traditions, doing nothing, except contemplating, is considered a very good way to spend time: simply being rather than doing. Being, in the present, is the whole point of this journey. And if I can find a way of embracing that idea and being at ease with it, this will be much more than a journey and its influence on us will live well past our journey's end.

Arty farty

Since I turned 40 I started exploring my artistic side. In the beginning I proceeded very tenderly because I was ‘unkind art teacher damaged’ but I am gaining confidence and started an arty business. The business has yet to gain the right momentum. One day I am going to truly believe that I can make it. But in the mean time I have horded quite a stack of toys and papers ‘and stuff’. I have got a beautifully light studio space which I AM GOING TO MISS. I just love messing around with new techniques and ideas and my latest love is something called Artist Trading Cards (ATC’s) Here you can find more details about it: http://www.artist-trading-cards.ch/

Here are examples of my efforts:

I will take some empty cards along and a pen and maybe I find a talent for drawing something others will be able to recognise.

Grateful

I was talking to my mother yesterday and she said she has to practise walking because she is going on a sight seeing tour in May. We joked about us both having to practise walking.

My mother has two knee replacements and 20 months ago she stumbled, fell and broke her leg badly which knocked her confidence. Since then she has fallen several times, thankfully not breaking anything but due to the artificial knee joints it is difficult for her to get up again on her own (which really bugs her). Her pride will not allow her to use a walking stick but neither will she ever give up. I admire her tenacity and grit greatly. She has always had it. Whether it was combining five children with a pristine house and garden or never staying down for long when she struggled with excruciatingly painful kidney infections and eventually losing one kidney. She turned 70 last year and has done an amazing job creating a new life for herself since my father died eight years ago.

My father died from a lung disease and in his last months he had to carry a rucksack with a supply of oxygen to be able to go anywhere. He knew his disease was progressive and incurable but he made the best of his life without drama. Not once did I hear him lament his fate. I am not sure I would be able to live out my life so dignified if I was in his situation.

And then there is Gary’s mum who is now practically housebound because she simply has not got enough breath to walk any distance. She is not a giver upper either and you rarely hear her complain.

Both our parents are good working class people. My father was a labourer in a factory, Gary's a labourer at the docks in London. They never had the choices they enabled us to have.

Gary and I often talk about how grateful and lucky we are and this year how privileged we are to be able to do attempt this walk (hey, a bit of caution is ok I think). Part of this is to find pleasure in simple experiences, special moments and making connections with other people rather than accumulating expensive stuff or chasing after the acknowledgement and praise from other people.

Walking through Kent in the sunshine last week for example. We walked for hours without seeing anybody – amazing as we were only 12 miles away from London city centre and there were some breathtaking views! And we were talking about love, life and the universe all the way. What better way to spend a Wednesday lunch!!