Perry's Blog

After a great, if not slightly odd feeling sleep, we headed down to visit Mum and then the train home.

Getting off at our home station and walking down our well-walked streets was an extremely odd feeling. Didn't quite feel real after such a big adventure, seemed to remind us of something Bilbo Baggins may have said, but couldn't remember what?

We'd walked just under 176 kms over 71.5 hours at an average speed of 2.5 km/h!

So we finished our walk with our packs weighing:
Sandi's Pack: 8.6kg
Perry's Pack: 16kg

Which is very odd, because I had spent quite a bit of time surreptitiously repacking the heavy items from Sandi's pack into mine. Don't understand that at all

Sandi and I had also lost some weight over the 13 days as well:
Sandi's lost weight: 2kg
Perry's lost weight: 5kg

We both hobbled around a bit too. Me more than Sandi. It seems like things caught up with us once we stopped walking.

The knock I took on my knee developed into rather a large bruise that took away my ankle for many days and filled in my instep. It became really painful so that walking was difficult. It was amazing that on the walk it was not apparent at all, but once stopped, I was quite debilitated with it. Maybe shouldn't have stopped walking??

Sandi is also still quite firm that she is never going to do such a big walk again. I feel devastated, I thought we were just getting into the swing of it?

Conclusion
I'm now writing this many months after doing the walk and writing the journal entries, but two main impressions that have stayed with me are:

1. It took some days to feel immersed in the bush, but once we were, I felt quite at home in a way I never have previously.
2. After spending many days alone with my wife, with almost no one else to talk to for days on end, I felt as though I was falling in love with my wife all over again: except with greater depth and passion.

I'd love to recapture that again if I can ever talk Sandi into doing a walk again