Wye Valley 2019 prelude

Monday the 22^nd and Tuesday the 23^rd of July 2019

This was the overnight trip to the U.K. that foreshadowed the interruption to my first walk, only one day in.

I flew out of Pearson airport in Toronto around 9 p.m. on a Monday night in July, not 100% sure I’d even return there (although at the time of writing this blog post, I’m pretty much resigned to it as I need to earn big money in order to have some expensive work done on my house in New Zealand, and returning to my job in Toronto is the only way I can do that).  I hadn’t had any water to drink or food to eat since around 5 or 6 p.m. that day.  For some reason I didn’t buy any at the airport.  The flight was just over 7 hours, during which I slept, and therefore was not offered any food or beverages.  After arriving in the U.K I then had a further 6 hours of trains with wait times in between before arriving at Chepstow a bit after 3 p.m. on Tuesday, still without purchasing anything to eat or drink while enroute.  I headed directly (well, not quite as I went the wrong way, circled back, stopped at the B&B to discover no one home, then retracted my steps) to Wetherspoons, where I ordered a small steak dinner and had a pint of cider (which suspiciously tasted like a lager) – my first food and drink in almost 24 hours.  Don’t get me wrong, I felt perfectly fine.  I am only giving you this preamble so that the events that follow (in the next days post) make a little more sense.  I did return to the B&B, met the owner (who was mentally unfocused, having arranged to go on holiday themselves the very next day), and found that the window of my smallish room looked directly out upon Chepstow Castle; nice!  Looking back, I realised that my late afternoon meal became the only meal of the day.  To be fair, I was also dealing, both mentally and physically, with a health issue I had been diagnosed with about a month or so earlier; a very small hernia.  I had been worried that it would impact my ability to walk long distances for 3 months solid, but the specialist I spoke to advised me not to let it impact my lifestyle; his exact words – “Don’t baby a hernia”.  Those words would come back to haunt me before the holiday was out.

Day 1