This walking is becoming seriously hard work. The cumulative effect of so many day's constant walking is taking it's toll on me. Even before our lunch stop today my quads were aching. By the time we reached Tadpole Bridge they were very sore and it was an effort to climb the steps up from the path to the road to cross the bridge to the pub.
The ground we walked on today was hard work - in places it was fairly flat but for long stretches it was very uneven. As we have reached these more remote parts of the path we have found they are not as well used. As well as being uneven, the path was overgrown in places and occasionally, there was no obvious path to follow. Also, like yesterday, we had to divert across a number of fields from time to time. But most of today's walking was along the riverbank so navigation was not an issue most of the time.
We had a couple of first's today - the first stile we have had to negotiate in 142 miles of walking - and we saw our first deer (it was spooked when we walked past a hedge and bounded off across a field). We have seen plenty of gees on our travel - today we saw what we christened meer-geese. Your first sight of them is of a pair of eyes and a beak peering over the long grass. They follow you as you walk along and as you come closer, they move off silently towards the river. It became more obvious why as we got closer - they had a large number of goslings they were protecting.
The Trout Inn at Tadpole Bridge are closed between 3pm and 6pm and were supposed to have left me a key. But there was no sign of it when we got there just after 4pm. We had to wait in the garden until 5:40pm before a very apologetic lady arrived brandishing our room key.
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