It's now May 29th here in Arundel, Maine and it's time to get serious about our upcoming 100 mile walking trip to England. We fly out of Boston on June 30th on Virgin Atlantic and after landing at Heathrow the next morning, will be picked up by a car to drive us - tired and jet-lagged - down to Winchester in southern England for a day of rest there before we start walking east on July 2. We plan to walk 8-12 miles a day and firmly believing that this a "Life Fulfillment Bucket" vacation, not a test of endurance, have arranged to have our backpacks picked up daily and carried by taxi to our next destination. We will be staying in a series of B & B's and small hotels as we wend our way eastward towards Eastbourne, a popular seaside vacation area. Our new friend Richard McKenna at Footprints of Sussex holiday tours is handling all the messy details for us.
We have done this sort of walking journey before, having walked in Spain on the Camino de Santiago and in England on the Cotswold Way the past couple of years and found it requires that we make a transformation of our outlook and priorities. First of all, we carry everything we need (except shelter & food) in our small light backpacks. We both use Osprey 33 (33 liter capacity) packs, although Sam may try his new ultra-lightweight Gossamer Ghost 26. This requires diligently evaluating (and weighing!) the difference between what we think we possibly might need and what we really DO need. It's amazing how simply one can live if you chose to do so, so at the end of the process, we're down to basically "wear one,carry one". We try to get down to a backpack that weighs around 13-14 pounds. We'll also use a small Osprey 12 day-pack to carry our rain gear, water, lunch, chocolates & almonds, emergency kit and the other 1000 & 1 things we'll use daily on the trail while our big packs are moving ahead of us in a taxi.
