The custard doughnuts. The cheeky little fox ate my custard doughnuts! I found the evidence on the way to the showers in the morning. Luckily what the fox didn't know was that Tesco made a mistake with the doughnuts and even though it said 5 on the packaging, there was actually 6 inside, so we lost out on nothing!
Today was officially the most boring day of my life, I even thought that a statistics module would provide me with more entertainment, which is obviously saying something. As the campsite was 3 miles south of where we needed to be (now heading east) we started the day in negative miles! We hate starting the day in negative miles, so we walked down to the spot where the man had picked us up to make sure our line had not been broken.
Unfortunatly the only way really to Edinburgh was via the Union canal, motorways and going off-piste were not an option! However the canal liked to go a bit north, a bit east, a bit south, and a bit west so it took us pretty much around the houses before we could get to where we wanted to! Just a note to Scottish waterways - either put up correct distance signs along the canal, or don't put them up at all, whoever was put in charge of them can obviously not count! It said 33 miles to Edinburgh.....5 miles later it would say Edinburgh 33! LIES ALL LIES!
We have learnt on this trip to take what people say with a pinch of salt, as they are usually wrong, however today we needed a bucket of salt, we were walking along mundane canal and we got chatting to a guy on the other side, he said Edinburgh was only 10 miles away and we could make it withing the hour. What superhuman can walk 10 miles an hour carrying over 20kg? I just agreed to disagreed and left, I wasn't in the mood to be lied to.
Coming in to Edinburgh was a bit depressing, our campsite (Morton Hall) was as south east as you could get so it was around 5pm and we still had about 15- 17km to walk, the canal was obviously at its busiest with people cycling on their way home from work, every time we started walking another annoying cyclist would DING DING their bell behind us and we had to keep moving to the side, I only got angry when a patronizing cyclist DING DINGED their bell when they were heading towards us! Idiot, of course we could see him, i was tempted to stick my leki pole out and hoped it would get stuck in the spokes.
The first hour in Edinburgh was by no means a success, there were a lot of bridges over the canal and we could see 3 kids stood on top of the bridge throwing what looked like sprouts at people walking below, we hoped they wouldn't throw them at us but then again what a better target than 2 people walking with sticks and massive bags!? We were getting nervous walking up to the bridge as these kids had quite a good throw on them, however what they didn't know was the Becks was in the rounders team! As they threw a sprout Becks hit it and pinged it really far with her Leki pole! The hit couldn't have been better executed, if went wrong, could have been highly embarrassing on both parties!
First obstacle complete. Next was a crazy angry man standing on the side of the canal shouting abuse at Becks as she walked past, I was then next to walk pat and the abuse continued, he was a complete nutter! And was shouting and swearing until we were out of sight a couple of hundred meters up the canal! Edinburgh was not being kind to us and as usual, we needed a wee and there was no where to go.
We muct have been looking confused stood on a bridge finally off the canal and a lady asked if we were okay she pointed to where we were on the map and we had majorly missed our turning to the campsite and were now in central Edinburgh! Luckily she told us where to go, we asked her if she knew anywhere we could go to the toilet in a really close radius, she wasn't sure than said she only lived across the road and we could come to her house on one condition - as long as we weren't psychos. We hoped the same back....
Best wee ever. She told us she was going to Exeter the next day and would try and find us on facebook and sponsor us which was very lovely. A massive thankyou to Yvonne as i might have weed myself. Back out on the streets in Edinburgh we were still lost and a car next to us asked if we were okay (not the car, the two people inside) They were saying the campsite was such a long way away - as if we didn't already know! However they were very cute and very helpful and said they would give us a lift however they were on their way to football training! WE would have happily watched training and then got a lift, but we just accepted directions instead.
As it had been a long day we decided to get the bus to the campsite and the following day on our rest day we would walk back to the same spot and walk back to the campsite, we had yet another corner shop binge and it was amazing! The campsite looked pretty picey charging £11pppn! So we cut ourselves a deal, buy one get one free! We just had to make sure Becks was hidden for 2 nights! We love a bargain!
No comments:
Post a Comment