To Monmouth

I realised that as the wifi kept dropping out yesterday, some of the names of the team had disappeared, so have added them in this morning.
A good night's rest, and ready to leave this morning at 7.45 for the 1.5 hours journey to the start of the walk.  One of the reasons for doing 3 miles yesterday was that we had a slightly shorter walk today - about 14 miles instead of 17.

View from our balcony of the river Wye.

Oh my goodness - what a day!  It started by playing hunt the wheel arch - George found that nearby.  It seems to have just dropped off the bus; there was some damage to the same side when it was picked up, so we are assuming they must have loosened the wheel arch.  Well that set us back a quarter of an hour, so we left at about 8am.  George drove, but he disobeyed our nice SatNav lady, and we ended up by going almost to Newport, so another 10 minutes added to the journey.  We eventually started walking at about 9.30.  You may have gathered that I am doing a bit more walking this year, so I probably won’t be reporting too much on the quality of the Welsh scones, I’ll have to get that info from Carol.

Our walk took us through some beautiful woodland with lots of bluebells; in a lot of mud; up a lot of hills; down a lot of muddy slippery hills;  but – it didn’t rain!  It was a slow walk though, we did initially say to Carol we would be at Monmouth at about 4pm, we actually arrived at 5.30.  I’m sure we did more than 14 miles; in fact I believe it was about 15 miles, and we did a lot of up, at least 3290 feet.  So with the mud and all those hills, and it was the first day, it took a while.

Ooh – I nearly forgot – Helen (in charge of finding porcelain loos) actually for the first time ever used a happy bush; so congratulation Helen, you deserve your gold star from your daughter.

Poor Carol had an interesting time trying to get through the Monmouth market traffic and finding a carparking space.  Once found she did a short walk on the Offa’s dyke path, but not as far as planned due to time and mud!  She then had a long wait for us, but I think she walked around the town a few times getting to know the shop keepers.

Anyway, we eventually got back to Hay at about 6.30.  Carol, Steve and I were on cooking duty, so we immediately set to and prepared a lovely warming chicken casserole and bread and butter pudding.

Ok, this could be one reason why we took a long time today!!

So to bed in a moment, we’ve another 17 miles to do tomorrow.