And so it begins....

Or how it was that two middle aged women thought it was a good idea to take on 880 miles of coastal path. A story of sea and sand, blisters and nettles.

We’d been talking about this walk for a long time. If I’m being honest, we’d been talking about this walk for decades. But somehow life had always got in the way.

We had first walked part of the Pembrokeshire Costal Path when we were sixth formers. Hopelessly underprepared, neither of us had walking boots and our rucksacks were canvas and weighed a ton. Neither of us were exactly Mother Nature’s Child. We were a walking advert for the dangers of going out into the countryside without the right kit. Coupled to this, we managed to pick one of the worst weeks ever to walk, when gale force winds killed sailors in a yachting race. It pissed with rain and blew a gale. Somehow we still enjoyed ourselves in spite of it all. In retrospect this was something of an omen. She said I sniffed all the time and I probably told her that she snored.

We laughed a lot and bummed a lift off a Milk Tanker at one point. I think the driver probably felt sorry for us. We were crap at this walking lark. We did meet an interesting group of kids of around our age from Bristol, and learned about the middle-class joys of Jordan’s Country Crunch (something of a revelation) as we took shelter from the torrents of rain and howling winds in their little tent. I like to think we learned something about ourselves, each other, and the big, wide world out there…

Time passed.

We grew up a bit, got married, had kids, moved house a few times, worked as teachers and moaned about it and then I was widowed. And life got harder and darker for a while. No one told me that it would be like this, back in the day when we walked The Path and laughed.

I was sitting in a sixth form assembly, bored out of my mind, when the idea hit me. I wasn’t alone in my boredom. Most of the sixth formers were on a knife edge between coma and riot. The Head of Sixth was droning on about his last holiday. There were pictures. Many, many pictures. There was probably a point in this somewhere but the point was a long time coming. God alone knew what it was. The kids weren’t impressed and I was rapidly losing the will to live. I was just reaching the point when even an INSET on target setting would have been preferable, when he said the words.

‘So I set myself a positive New Year’s Resolution and I kept it!’

I came out of my reverie and focused on the pictures for a moment. Something about driving cars and I began to drift back off and he said it again, ‘This was my New Year’s Resolution and it was GREAT!’

A bolt from the blue, I was awake now. I scanned the kids. Nothing. Most of them seemed half asleep, Ryan Eagle was drooling on the shoulder of the kid sitting next to him. No one wanted to sit next to Ryan. He had an intermittent relationship with washing. Drooling while asleep was one of his better attributes. But I was awake. I had the IDEA. This time it would work. This time it would be easy. Sure, I was a bit older. Almost 40 years older but never mind that. This time I had walking boots. This time I had a waterproof backpack. This time it would be fun. All I had to do was to persuade Rhian.

Rhian is in almost every way the perfect walking partner.