Challenge number 19 now complete! I was inspired to do this when my friend Jas first mentioned it over a year ago. I was lucky to have experienced perfect weather conditions, unlike the torrential rain from last weekend’s camping trip in the Peak District!
The Seven Sisters are the 7 chalk cliffs you can see in the picture below. The total distance was 13 miles and despite hiking up and down the 7 peaks it wasn’t too difficult. I’ll shortly produce a blog post on my travel blog where full details can be found!
As the highest point in the Peak District in Derbyshire I had always thought of Kinder Scout as a peak or a hill rather than a mountain. However, as Wikitravel and other websites classify Kinder Scout as a mountain, I’ve added it as the third mountain climbed in 2018! (And at 636 meters it was actually higher than Slieve Tooey last Saturday which is a mountain…)
Chris and I had a great weekend with 5 of our friends where we camped in Edale and climbed Kinder Scout last Saturday in lovely sunny weather.
Torrential rain the following day
By complete contrast we climbed another two peaks the following day in torrential rain, temperatures not much above freezing and high winds!
A good effort this week with quite a few of these miles completed during a fabulous hiking and camping weekend in the Peak District in Derbyshire.
With another 18 weeks left in 2018 and a new target of 2000 miles walked I will need to keep the pace up and walk an average of 35 miles each week for the rest of the year!
My second mountain of 2018! As part of a group of 7 I climbed to the 511 m summit of Slieve Tooey in County Donegal, Ireland last weekend. After a fantastically warm summer of record breaking temperatures, our climb was wet and windy with the remnants of Tropical Storm Ernesto at the top! Thankfully we were in the safe hands of Kevin, our guide. With the mist and poor visibility at the top his navigation and map reading skills were essential. A full blog post of my Donegal weekend can be found on my travel blog.
During past weekends, Chris and I had walked most of the 62.5 miles of the Norfolk Coast Path and had only 7 miles (between Mundesley and Cromer) left to do… well this has now been achieved and full details of the entire 62.5 mile route can be found on our travel blog.
A couple of decent weeks of walking progress… the most exciting 16 of these miles were racked up in Switzerland on a last weeks’ hiking weekend! It was fantastic to hike in soft powdery pure white snow.
Little did I know that I would come back to snow in the UK… and have just completed a 9 mile hike in local snow this morning! It was melting so was muddy and slushy and I managed to fall over twice…
I’ve now actually started to use Map My Walk too rather than estimating my mileage using Google Maps… I downloaded this app to my phone a couple of years ago but have never bothered to use it… until now…
In addition, a quick check on annual progress towards target:
Monthly average for January and February 2018 (240 / 2) = 120 miles per month
Daily average for January and February (240 / 60) = 4 miles a day
Monthly average left for the next 10 months (810 / 10) = 81
Daily average left for the next 10 months (81 / 30) = 2.7
So if I keep up this rate of mileage (around 120 miles per month) I should reach my target to walk 1050 miles in 2018 some time in September! It will be interesting to see what happens and if I achieve this…
Another 50@50 activity for my half century celebration year was to have a snowy weekend away!
My husband Chris and I returned yesterday from a weekend of snow hiking in Switzerland… and little did we know that we would arrive home to a week of snow and freezing temperatures in the UK thanks to a weather system known as ‘the beast from the east‘ which has seen temperatures plummet across Europe. Even the Mediterranean islands of Corsica and Capri have seen snow!
Fifty at Fifty 