Knees Up

I've never known a year like it for niggling little injuries. The first six weeks of the year was spent coughing like a sheep with a chest infection or "man flu" as Jackie my wife refered to it as. Then when I started running my knee swelled up like a Montgolfier balloon. At the start of this month I thought I had a twinge in my back which now it seems has morphed into sciatica. It's not just me. Derrick has had problems with his ankles, and at the moment is suffering from shin splints, very painfull. I can only hope this list of injuries and ailments means that we will have a trouble free, easy 7 weeks of trekking, otherwise we will be carrying a small hospitals worth of drugs and appliances to get us over the mountains!

As well as raising money we have been tentatively planning the trip itself. Derrick has been plotting the route onto daily route cards and been cross referencing them to the maps we will have to carry. All the maps we need are listed on the right. If you pile them all togther they weigh nearly 6lb or nearly 3 kg for you youngsters. Our equipment list is getting longer, which means the red pen will have to come out and start whittling it down. Derrick thinks a phonograph would be nice, so we can listen to some music in the evenings . He also seems to have forgotten that the porters are not accompanying us on this trip and the iPod has been invented. With only 109 days to go we both seem to be experiencing what pilots call ground rush. The feeling when coming in to land that everything is fine, slowly descending, when all of a sudden, whoosh you hit the ground. At the end of this month we will be shopping for our train tickets to get us to our start point at Hendaye, on the Atlantic caost of France. So, like the swan, majestically gliding along the waters surface, you can now see that underneath we are paddling like mad to get this trip sorted.