Friday July 8, 2022, 50 km (31 miles) – Total so far: 1,060 km (659 miles)
It was not a great start to the day. Yesterday we arrived at camp cold and wet and didn’t venture into the town, so we decided to go this morning. It was only 2 kms but it happened to be up a really steep hill.
Anyway, the town was quirky and quaint with some neat old chocolate ripple buildings. After snapping a few photos we headed up to the church and I caught my shin on my pedal causing a couple of painful puncture marks.
I’m it gonna lie but it hurt like mother crockery! I swore like mad and stopped to recover while Mike continued on, completely ignoring me.
Anyway it was a good 10 minutes until the pain subsided enough to walk over to a chair so Mike could put a couple of plasters on it. Stupidly we didn’t bring any iodine, so I hope it will be ok. It ached like crazy for a couple of hours, then came right. I reckon a big bruise will come from it.
Then we got lost coming out of town, and we have no idea of how. We followed the well marked sign in the direction we were headed, next thing we were on a main road with trucks barrelling down it. We mucked around for ages, consulting with Google, the Garmin, and our paper maps until we finally figured it out.
We got back onto the canal paths today but for some reason everything hurt. My bum, knee, neck and now my shin! Apart from my knee I’d been relatively pain free for this trip. I’m blaming the hilly day yesterday.
The highlight of the day was seeing an Otter. Mike spotted him and we stood and watched as he ate weed and swam around, oblivious to his admirers. He looked like a wet puppy dog, oh so cute!
Then he started swimming closer to us when he looked up, saw us watching and ducked under the water, gone. The other highlight was finding and Aldi store near our camping where we could finally stock up on supplies.
The camping is nice. We have a shelter to cook under and also he has set up solar power to charge our phones. Awesome!
You can follow our journey on YouTube here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAP03_iOV9QrtahRxRPBTVB9ZTNOmdiznv
