Back to ailments. But you'll be glad to know over-eating isn't one of them. (Yet, I am just about to order dinner.) I discovered a lump on my achilles. If you poke it, it is a bit sore. One of the poor people that I subjected it to at breakfast (don't worry, no pus or blood or anything like that—it's all sub-cutaneous) believes it is my achilles knotting up. I tend to agree. He gave me some foot exercises to do to help. Handy having a podiatrist (unqualified) at breakfast.
My other ailment is that I think, after all my whining about the lack of sun, I have got a bit of sunstroke today. It was a long hot day with never a tree in sight. On paper it looked long but doable. By lunch I had shortened the destination point. At two thirty I started the ascent of the only 'real' hill of the day—a civilised scramble to about five-seventy meters. By five I was lying on a river bank at the bottom of the other side. By six, despite the path being relatively flat, I wished I was dead. (Accountable by both the burgeoning headache, nausea and hotness of my perceived sunstroke, and, by the habit they seem to have on the paths here of lining them with a solid layer of rock and scree, painful to walk on, liable to twist an ankle at any minute). By seven-thirty I was being swayed into paying a lot more for a night's accommodation than I really wanted to just so that I didn't have to walk any further and for a bathroom as big as some rooms I have stayed in.
On account of both of these things, and the fact that the day was foreshortened (distance, not time), I believe it is time to rethink the route. If I had made it to Keswick (pronounced Kes-ick) I was going to try for High Pike the day after. When I decided to stop in Stonethwaite instead I decided to have a short day tomorrow and just walk to Keswick and then do the long day over High Pike the day after. After all those stones and all those treeless slopes, I am thinking the short day, with a late start, is a definite, followed by taking to the road around the Pike—life is too short to keep going over things. Mind you, the scenery was amazing. Odd that they pepper it with low, extremely low, flying fighter jets. I nearly fell of the hill the first time one went over—they are so loud. I hope they can't see much from up there because another time they went over was a toilet stop. I am a little dwarfed by the walkers here. They are bouncing up and down mountains all over the place. 'Oh, I've just gone up and down X, Y and Z today, and along the top to AA, not a lot today,' they say. Good on them, but I have somewhere to be.
A very, very longed for good night to Stonethwaite, good night to you.
Well I think there might actually be a certain Dog back in Australia who would be quite frightened by the noise of those Jets overhead. I am totally convinced you require and are well and truly overdue for a well deserved long foot massage.
ReplyDelete