Tuesday 8 May: Sandford to Sampford Peverell
Planning a walk is a wonderful thing. If you do it right, you know where you’ll wind up, where you’ll be staying, and low long it will take. Of course, as you go along the planning, you make changes. The trick, of course, is to remember to update your plan with these changes. If you don’t….
Today we awoke refreshed and invigorated, having had the half-day of rest, a hearty meal and a great night’s sleep. We were ready for our 29km day and set off at a good speed, chewing up the first few kilometres with ease. It was pleasantly cool and ideal walking conditions and we were still very much enjoying the countryside. Even the ensuing couple of hills that we had dreaded proved to be nowhere as challenging as they looked on the map. We walked east to Thorverton, had a brief rest, then over the hills to the north and down into the Exe valley to walk north to Tiverton. That was really lovely with some gorgeous bluebell woods and the lovely River Exe to our left. We got to the market town of Tiverton around 4.30 and stocked up on a few essentials. We set off again, picking up the beginning of the Grand Western canal for what would be a short but lovely canalside walk to Sampford Peverell.
Or so we thought.
We walked. And we walked. And we walked. As we left the canalside to our accommodation we saw a sign telling us that our ‘brief’ canalside walk had in fact been 8 miles (13km). We got there at 7pm, absolutely shattered. Thank goodness we were staying at a pub as we only had to stagger downstairs to get dinner.
After, we did a recalculation of the distance for the day. The result? 36km (or 22 miles)! No wonder we were so tired. That is six-sevenths of a full marathon – with a pack. As to why it was so much longer, we can only think it was one of those occasions where we had to change our endpoint but hadn’t gone back to recalculate the mileage. We were pleased we hadn’t known that when we started the day. On the plus side, it was still a beautiful dry spring day for walking, with many points of interest.
If you wondered why we posted no blog on the day, now you know!
Total distance: 36km.
Scrumpy to Scotch 
You missed the opportunity of a class pun with ‘The Unexpected(Lee) Long Journey’ but after that sort of walk, it’s pretty understandable.
May the weather be kind to you to make up for the extra k’s you have conquered .
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