Day 25: I'm happy I chose the road

Day 25: 

Day 25: you eat an elephant one bite at a time. I can't remember who said that (General Patton? Schwarzkopf? If you know please comment) but I like it. Today was a big bite. I set off from Langhome at about 4 pm yesterday and immediately lost phone signal. I walked up the B road into the Esk valley for several hours, with the intention of reaching Eskdalemir Forest, which I didn't (I gave up 50 minutes too early). I made camp at 7:30 pm in a thick pine plantation riddled with ticks, midges and mosquitoes. It was a gloomy, silent woodland with no life. The pines were planted among the decaying remains of the previous crop of trees harvested long ago. I'd walked for maybe 10 hours, I was done. I wrapped myself in a mosquito net and slept in a body shaped furrow between two rows of pines. The alarm was set for 05:30; I woke at 7 and was off at 7:40 into the damp hill fog. Before I left the woods I took a long look at the maps. Armchair me plotted a ballsy risky route though hilly forest trails, then a 5 mile bushwhack through unknown terrain with no paths, two stream crossings and a bog like Bodmin Moor in order to hook up with the Southern Upland Way, a hard trail that leads a long way to nowhere. Modern me looked at that and said 'No way.' instead I chose to simply follow the best B road ever (the 709) all the way to Ettrick and then all the way to Innerleithen. 8 miles from the end I met Tom from the Gordon Arms Hotel who insisted on filling my water tank up for free and giving me a free coke. He told me he'd just helped out a pair of hikers who had abandoned the Upland Way, opted to walk down the A road instead and offered him £50 for a lift to town. They were exhausted and had 'lost' someone up there. I'm happy I chose the road. 31 miles, 10.5 hours.


A long day from Eskdalemuir to Innerleithen.

View from the hotel room, Innerleithen.

A note about the blog

I must be the only LEJOGer without a smart phone. This means I don't have the ability to update this blog when I'm on the trail. My support team back home kindly offered to update the blog for me, so this will be communicated by text message and written up on my behalf. It will therefore be brief and without photos. I will expand on this when I get back from my journal entries, dictaphone recordings and photo journal. The detailed account will be published as a book which will be available on Amazon.

Charity

Thank you to everyone who has made a donation to Helping Hands for the Blind, a respectable local charity. You can make a donation here. Using Gift Aid, the charity is able to claim an additional percentage of each donation from the government as part of the Gift Aid scheme.  

While I am not tracking how much has been raised, the charity themselves may wish to do that; leaving a note with your donation such as "LEJOG" will help them do that. To be frank, it's more important that they receive donations than it is for me to take credit; they're actually doing something important whereas I am going on what could be described as a holiday.

My books

Lastly and leastly, I am an independent author. Writing is a pleasure even if reading it isn't! I will write an account of my LEJOG journey in the form of a book which hopefully will encourage other people to give LEJOG a try (and probably discourage many more). If you want a copy, the first batch will be given free of charge. Ask and you shall receive...

My other books are available on Amazon:


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