Choosing your walking partner...

Simple words cannot convey how important this is. A good walking partner will help you through the tough bits of a walk. In a perfect world, they will be slightly less fit than you are. Though of course in my case this is simply not true.This boosts your flagging, sweating ego as you gasp for breath as you flog up a hill. This is vital since you don’t want to set out on a long walk with some fitness freak who will walk for 10 miles with only the odd sip of water, sucking on their teeth with disappointment as you gasp and wheeze up that hill. Super fit is not what we are looking for here. The walk is going to be hard enough without feeling like you did in PE lessons as a kid. (Always the last picked, the PE staff would give me a C+ grade because I always had my kit and I was clean. They didn’t like me but at least I didn’t irritate them.) I did. I could have been very good at PE – athletic build, and all that – but I hated organised games, forged my own notes, and regularly “forgot” my kit.

That said, neither do you want someone so unfit that they will pass out at an inconvenient point. Mobile phone coverage is patchy on the costal path and you might not be able to make a 999 call. Plus, a lapsed Baptist can’t give the last rites. So you want some one fit enough to cope but not so fit as to leave you feeling second rate.

You also need to have someone with a skill you don’t possess, like reliable map reading. Or the ability to buy yoghurt covered raisins. Or the ability to laugh at crap jokes. Or put up with sniffing. Rhian had it all; the perfect walking partner. She was much better at map reading than I was and would be able to keep us on the straight and narrow. She also knew her way round the snacks aisle of the local health store and could buy yoghurt raisins with ease. We’d know each other for over four decades and oddly she still seemed to find me marginally more amusing than irritating. Hmmm…This is a rare attribute.

This is us,just before we started the first day of the first walk, from Cardigan to Aberporth.

Helen is the stunning blonde on the left with the scraggy neck and Rhian is the slighly hysterical women on the right.

At this point we have very little idea of what we are letting ourselves into. We know it is going to involve some walking but we have no idea that the day will involve getting lost, Shoeless Joe Jackson, a previously unspoken fear of cows and a hotel made for Fawlty Towers.

'Look, it will be better this time.’

‘In what way?’

‘ Boots, we will have better boots. And rucksacks. It will be easy and fun, it will be fun. Or at least fun. And I will not sniff.’

‘No sniffing?’

‘None, I guarantee. And no youth hostels this time. Or gales. It will be easy.’

‘Hmmm’

‘Honestly, it will be great and it will give you the chance to buy new boots and make lists’. This was my killer selling point, she loves a list, does our Rhian.

‘OK’

Of course she had the perfect attributes for the perfect walking partner. She was prepared to do it with me.