Pete Thomas’s Blog

This weekend we needed to do two 4 hour walks. It’s easy enough to do one, but the real test is to get up the next morning and trundle off on another. This wasn’t too bad, on Saturday we did a walk from the Hampshire Teashop Walks book which went from Stockbridge on a roundish route to somewhere for tea and then back along the River Test to Stockbridge. The Teashop was a disaster though, small teapot with one teabag for two people and 20 minutes for my rhubarb crumble to arrive so we just left without it. I had some blisters under my feet at the end so a bit worried about another 4 hours tomorrow.

This is the first weekend of serious training (ie longer than the paltry 5 mile walks we’ve been doing up to now). We needed to do a 4 hour walk this weekend so decided to walk along the Itchen Way from Southampton up towards Winchester and then turn back after a couple of hours. We had Jim (our 6 year old) so perhaps it was more of a nature ramble rather than full-on trekking. Anyway he was very proud to spot a deer, fungus on a tree that looked like poo, and went on to find at least twenty interesting wildlife features, including this bug (called “Bugwin”) which became his friend and hitched a ride on his face, ear, hair, neck and arms for a mile or two.