End of Thursday's Trekking

Day 4 of trekking over and we are sitting in the patio bar of the hotel at
the end of this day's walking and the place we will start from tomorrow
morning. The day has been amazing, despite the persistent rain. We
started back at the point we finished, with a much better system for
allocating wall catchers as they lined up and tagged alongside each person
as we walked through.

We have walked steep sections of the Wall today, with one section
colloquially known as "The Little B**tard", for which the previous record
for running up was 45 seconds. Well our Ken (with lots of whooping from
the rest of us) made it in up in 30 seconds and set a new gold standard.
The rest of us took a more sedentary 3 - 5 minutes, taking one breath per
step, and pacing ourselves up the hill.

The mist was rolling through the mountain peaks, looking for all the world,
like a backshot from Lord Of The Rings, any second we expected to see
Gandalf and the Hobbits comes towards us out of the murk. Instead we had
the noisy trekkers singing at the back to keep our spirits up. More orc
than hobbit!

Once we had made the highest point we had lunch, then it was mainly
downhill to the end. The only thing that spoilt the feeling of
achievement, was the looming challenge of tomorrow's trek. The Wall scales
the ridge of the mountains all the way, to what seems to be the top of the
world, like some lazy Dragon sprawled over the jagged contours of the
peaks. Never mind we are up before dawn, or that we have 12,000 steps up
to go, it is going to be amazing.

We can't believe we only have 1 day of walking to go, it has all gone so
fast, but we have crammed so many experiences into the time. Thank you all
so much for the comments on the blogs, we read them every morning and they
are a great boost to our morale, so keep them coming.

Andrew, Ann & Simon