Day 5 - Westerham to Rochester

The Walk

Let's start with an apology. Yesterday's blog might have been a bit moany, it was a long day and today I'm going to be more positive. We made it......

But seriously, today's walk was our longest so far and it will be the longest of the whole challenge, unless we take a major wrong turn.

We left Westerham at 7am and rejoined the North Downs Way. The trail in this area is still hilly but the terrain was much more forgiving than yesterday's and we both felt surprisingly strong.

We covered some beautiful countryside, had a small scare from a Bull in a field who we were giving a wide birth, but who then decided to snort at us and make steps in our direction, which made us up our pace significantly and led to my highest recorded pulse rate of the day. Otherwise the walk was fairly uneventful, as we continued, through the pleasant village of Otford before reaching Wrotham where we stopped for lunch.

This brings me on to how we entertain ourselves on some of the long stretches of our walk. We often walk in silence just focusing on one step at a time, but occasionally we break into song (the road is long... a particular favourite). On Monday we played the A, B, C game which will be familiar to must people with kids. However, we played it with a difference; each taking it in turn to come up with a rude word or saying, that starts with the current letter. Hopefully no one overheard us, as who knows what they would have thought!!

Wrotham is a pretty village and the locals, we encountered, all wished us well and the landlady of the public house that we stopped at, made us tuna mayo baguettes, especially, as she obviously took pity on us and how tired we looked.

After lunch we set off with renewed vigour, ignoring the blisters that we both are now nursing, and pounded on through more beautiful landscapes until we finally spotted the Medway twin bridges that signalled the end of our days walk. It was a good day and we're feeling positive about getting to the end. Only 2 days to go!!

Rochester Cathedral

We didn't actually walk to the cathedral (that was a step to far!)

Rochester Cathedral is England's second oldest, founded by Bishop Justus. The present building dates back to the work of the French monk Bishop Gundulf in 1083.

Rochester was for many years a favourite of Charles Dickens, one of my favourite authors, basing many of his novels on the area including The Pickwick Papers and his unfinished murder mystery, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

His wish was to be buried in the churchyard at Rochester Cathedral. Instead, his body was interred at Poets' Corner inside Westminster Abbey.

Church Watch with Phil

St George's, Wrotham

Stats

Today was 45.68 km which we covered in 9 hours and 33 minutes excluding our lunch break.

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