Saturday the 8th May 2010.

This is the day where after weeks and months of planning I would finally start out on my journey walking the full length of the UK from its most south westerly tip in Cornwall, England, to its most north eastern point in Caithness, Scotland. I had decided to embark on this adventure after being made redundant at work as my company was relocating operations to their Texan branch. After the stressful work challenges of the preceding years it was time to do something else for a while, spend time seeing some of UK's beautiful places, and hopefully raise a little bit of money for the local children's hospice along the way. I'd made lots of plans and done lots of training but i'd never done anything quite so out of the ordinary before. I wasn't a seasoned adventurer, and now, at the time of setting off, I recall it was all rather daunting! What follows below is a reproduction of the blog that I wrote using my iPhone 3GS while I was trekking.

Well it was always going to be an eventful day wasn't it!

The good:

I've started! I don't have any new blisters yet, the coach arrived on time, the sun came out very briefly, watching the surfers playing in the waves, looking at the beautiful scenery, and the nice new-zealanders I shared dinner with (hi hope your enjoying your hols)

The not so good:

It rained a fair bit, my knees still haven't recovered fully from last weekends training, I got almost no sleep on the coach down here last night.

The disasterous:

I accidentally deleted the ordnance survey 1:50000 map of the entire UK from my phone last night while fiddling with iTunes but didn't realise until this morning... Aaaarrrgh! Yes I did have a few minutes of huffy at lands end this morning. In true project
management fashion and thanks to my good friend Sebatien there is a recovery plan in place though so I should have them again when I arrive at Bristol. Until then it's ten days of road walking using an AA road atlas! At least I'll make good time I suppose even if it's not so pleasant as the intended route.
Please let there be no problems on day 2!

Daily stats:
Start - Lands End
Finish - Saint Ives
Mileage - 20 miles
Hours - 11am to 7.30pm
Sleeping - Saint Ives travellers and surfers bunk house

That's all folks ;-)

Posted by Malcolm at 13:41

if you want to see the original blog it is here but I rather hope you choose to follow me instead. Thanks Steemians!