One minute you’re soaring, headed for the stars and the next you find yourself flat on the ground looking up at those very same stars that now seem unreachable.
I have gone through a vast learning curve over the last few days… It’s been hot and humid, not 30 degrees, about 28 and quite the challenge for us to walk in! We start early and walk for about two, maybe three hours depending on where the park seats are, or if there is a town with a café. About this time, we swap our bandanas for our floppy hat and put on sunscreen. We try to keep up the same pace as the morning, but either the sun, or the path slow us down.
The paths varied, mud, gravel, slippery surfaces, the uphill, downhill all play a part… so we stop to rest after about an hour, sometimes after an hour and a half. After about seven hours on the road, we arrive at our lodgings, tired and hot, not wanting to do anything else but stop, have a drink and maybe lie down. We have been lucky, or Bill has done some amazing forward planning, as some places have swimming pools! I’ve been in once, but Bill has used every single one of them… cold at first but refreshingly invigorating.
What I learnt after four consecutive hot, steamy days, followed by overnight thunderstorms and a few tumbles on our part (I have tripped, stumbled, lost my balance and fallen, Bill has slipped and landed heavily) is that one must accept one’s limitations and if necessary, adapt to the new circumstances! Today we faced a 30+ kilometre walk… 1. miscalculation?… no… it was a matter of where there was a bed for the night… 2. over-estimation of how far we could walk? … perhaps… despite, or maybe because of our training in Melbourne, we definitely thought that since we could walk 25 kms, 30 kms after 5 weeks of non stop walking… we would be able to do it easily! Not so, we have found our new limit is 20 kms, and probably 25 degrees. We don’t like climbing up steep slopes, especially three or four successive ones, nor ones that go on forever. Neither do we like steep descents and uneven paths with differently sized stones… paths that turn into streams or slippery, muddy quagmires.
My coming down to earth, literally, was caused by a wayward root that snagged my right foot and saw me falling to the ground, like a felled tree, my hands saving my face from hitting the dirt by centimetres. My next two incidents were all because of the mud… We would be happily walking along, enjoying the scenery, the birdsong, chatting away and then we would hit an impasse… nothing to do except go through as best we could… except it’s slippery and even with poles I slid and fell… not in the mud, but thorny bushes! Bill’s incident was similar, walking down a slippery path, and slide, then thwack.
The salutary lesson … bruised in both body and ego we needed to re-group. Cut the day’s walk to about 20 kilometres, start early, have plenty of breaks and make sure we get to Saint Jean Pied-de-Port in one piece as planned. It is, after all about the journey!