As you walk along you meet different people, some walk alone others are in groups of twos, threes and fours. Not knowing their names at this early stage tends to make you assign nicknames to them ( nothing derogatory I hope !) so here are a few of ours for the main characters in the daily diary that follows :-
Mrs. Hull.............. Sheila Clark.
The Middlesboro Crew............Rosemary, Bev and Steve. (and occasionally Richard).
Solo..............Joanne.
The Yorkshire Couple..............Terry and Val.
Him and His Missus.................Dave and Helen.
The two couples.................Dave and Audrey, Ian and Linda.
The Bolton Couple............Rob and Ann.
The Aussies..................Sheila and Peter.
Brian and Albert............simply that, Brian and Albert!
Dad and his Lad.............Geoff and Oscar.
I would like at this point to wish everyone we met on the walk, a long life, good health and happy walking, it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance and if anyone else undertaking the walk meets such a fine group of people they will indeed be lucky. Please keep in touch I would be very interested in keeping up with your adventures, Alan.
Although there were many others that we met along the way we didn't get to know them the same as the people mentioned above due to differences in our itinerary. There were three English lads who now live in Spain walking the route who cheerfully said that this was the first and last time that they would walk the C to C, one even went as far to say that he would not even come back to England again he was that knackered!!!!!. He did have a bad leg at the time though.
Sitting at home making your plans and breaking the route into manageable sections you think to yourself that 23 miles in one day is no big thing, but take it from me the effects of walking these sections day after day after day if you do not normally do these long distance walks do take it out of you, fortunately I did not suffer any blisters along the way but Karl got a few. What I did find was that my boots were far to heavy for this type of walking, they are Meindl Nepals, brilliant for in the mountains and really comfortable but after about 6 days continuous walking my achilles tendons swelled up a bit and the bottoms of my feet took longer and longer to recover after each day. I will be using a pair of lightweight fabric boots with a goretex lining for my next long distance walk for sure.
Myself and Shaun took 40 litre rucksacks with us and they weighed in at around 26lbs overall (including a full 1 litre bottle of water) Karl however took a 65 litre rucksack and everything bar the kitchen sink that weighed in at around 36lbs, needless to say after day 1 he started to ditch things, leaving bottles of shower gel and other assorted items at each nights stopover until he was happy with the weight.