A couple of weeks ago I went on my actual Duke of Edinburgh walk (scary!) which meant walking 17km on the Saturday and 18km on Sunday. This may or may not sound like a long way but we were carrying over 13kg on our backs and we were climbing giant hills! Anyway we started off from a car park in Firle and I was the first to map read... bit of a mistake seeing as I barely know my left and right! So we walked, got a bit lost, made friends with some cows and trampled through someone's field. Overall the journey there was fine apart from a couple of parts... as we were walking along the side of a road I lost my balance (damn you giant rucksack!), toppled over and sprained my ankle! However I soldiered on through because our group had worked so hard to get to where we were and it would all be a complete waste of time if I quit then. We then got to have lunch at Arlington Reservoir which was only meant to take 20 minutes but we ended up spending an hour lolling about and getting ice cream (YUM!). We then walked to Alfriston to a camp site and it turned out we were the last there by around two hours!! In total that day we had walked just over 10 hours! We were knackered! For dinner we had soup for starters, then spaghetti and pesto, then chocolate in our tent. The night was absolutely FREEZING - the teachers said it got to 2 degrees celsius - so this meant I got maximum two hours sleep.
The next day we were all exhausted and the thought of doing it all again was dire. We were determined to be the first to leave as we arrived last that night, so we woke up at 6:30, got breakfast ready and got changed. At around 7:30 we started taking the tents down which was horrible because there were crane flies everywhere! I HATE crane flies! Anyway once the tents were down all we had to do was pack away everything which we were surprisingly fast at. So we all managed to leave at 8:45 which was roughly the time we wanted to set off. Sadly we were not the first to leave, as the group we had a friendly rivalry with set off 15 mins before us. However as we reached the toilet block the were all standing outside trying to work out where they were going, which meant we were the first to leave!
Our route was pretty simple because we just had to follow the river. However because we are lazy we kept having breaks and once we got to the first meeting point we were VERY late! So to prove we could walk faster, the supervisors made us walk to the beach and back in one hour, so we took off and made it back with 5 mins to spare. We then had lunch in a car park because we could not be bothered to find somewhere else and ate sooooo much food! After lunch we set of without realising the horror ahead of us... We reached the bottom of the seven sisters, looked at the map and saw we had to walk over all seven of these hills! Now if you live near these then you will understand our misery but if you don't then basically the seven sisters are seven giant hills on the edge of the sea, so they can get very windy at times! We even named some of the sisters - for example the obese sister and the baby sister. The good news was that once we finished the seven sisters we were done! It was all over!
So that was my Duke of Edinburgh experience and I hope you enjoyed reading it. If you have any questions then comment below. I reply to all comments so I look forward to chatting to some of you :) I shall now leave you with photos from my trip. Enjoy and have a good rest of the day!
Our route was pretty simple because we just had to follow the river. However because we are lazy we kept having breaks and once we got to the first meeting point we were VERY late! So to prove we could walk faster, the supervisors made us walk to the beach and back in one hour, so we took off and made it back with 5 mins to spare. We then had lunch in a car park because we could not be bothered to find somewhere else and ate sooooo much food! After lunch we set of without realising the horror ahead of us... We reached the bottom of the seven sisters, looked at the map and saw we had to walk over all seven of these hills! Now if you live near these then you will understand our misery but if you don't then basically the seven sisters are seven giant hills on the edge of the sea, so they can get very windy at times! We even named some of the sisters - for example the obese sister and the baby sister. The good news was that once we finished the seven sisters we were done! It was all over!
So that was my Duke of Edinburgh experience and I hope you enjoyed reading it. If you have any questions then comment below. I reply to all comments so I look forward to chatting to some of you :) I shall now leave you with photos from my trip. Enjoy and have a good rest of the day!
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ah i remember doing my gold dofe, so many funny memories, even if I moaned at the time haha.. total credit to you being a trooper and carrying on with a sprain, I dont think I could have done the same :) xx
ReplyDeletewow well done for doing gold! Yeah the majority of the time consisted of some sort of moaning :) aw thank you, the strange thing was I could walk on it without too much pain. Thank you for commenting as well - made my day xx
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