Hi, I wrote the below text this morning but had no wifi. Now in Canterbury and here it is. more to follow soon…

Yesterday (Saturday) was not one of our best. I was hoping to post a new blog in the morning but couldn’t get on the internet. I have postponed that blog and want to share our mini adventure with you instead.

We got up and despite not posting anything, the morning was lovely, the breakfast was very good and we set off in good spirits we saw a bit more of Lenham as we made our way through it to re-join the way. We even bought an Eccles cake and Belgian iced bun for our morning break, we worked our way through a narrow path in a field of ripe wheat and could see an amazing monument  a plain white cross set into the hillside above us. We joined the path and paused in front of the memorial before setting off along the beautiful but very uneven and rough path.

About four miles into our fifteen for the day Alison tripped and fell hard down the slope. Full weight of her pack adding to the force of the fall. Despite being too fast for me to do athing, I saw it all in slow motion and still have the short film in my head.

I helped her up and we were both thankful that nothing was broken and that it had not been her head, but her shoulder and arm that had taken the force of the fall. But the jagged stones had done their best to do harm and Alison had lots of scratches a bad graze and a deep wound in her forearm.

Of course, we have a good supply of first aid materials and we cleaned the wounds, disinfected them and covered them in sterile pads held in place with micropore.

I searched for the nearest medical centre and we struck off along the ridge then down to Charing where the receptionist at the medical centre called a taxi for us and we eventually headed off through the heavy traffic to Ashford’s hospital. This whole area has been affected badly by the problems in Dover and all of the motorways and many A roads are just jammed with lorries and cars full of frustrated holiday makers. So we had to show patience as we trundled slowly between one jam and onto another – at least we had not been in a stuffy car or lorry cab for the last 24 hrs!

A and E in a local hospital is a thing in itself. It took more than six hours to be seen. The place was understaffed, the patients queuing were all worried and frustrated and there was no information about who was going to be seen next. It was made worse by the fact that we were all crammed into a small waiting room and a couple of other rooms and there were several different invisible queues – there were two doctors, one specialising in children, and three or four nurses of different sorts dealing with surgical, orthopaedic and other issues. Every so often a couple of ambulance staff would come down and try to insert a heart patient into the mix as the other A and E section was overwhelmed and they wanted to get away and go to another call.

After our long wait, and after several conversations with different people in the queue, alison was patched up and I called for a taxi, which never came. Eventually I managed to blag ourselves a lift with a taxi that had just let off his passenger at the entrance to the hospital.

So we arrived at our night stop at half seven last night more worn out than we would have been if we had walked all day.

We are very thankful that the fall was not anything like as bad as it could have been and also very thankful that Alison’s resilience and strength have yet again shown themselves to be great. So, despite the cuts and bruises we will continue on. We are very glad that we have enough experience to know what to do and how to do it so when we arrived at the nurse’s room she was presented with clean and dressed wounds that she could work with. We are also grateful to her both for her skills and kindness (to the point where I got a lesson in how to take out the stitches, and the equipment to do so safely). We were thankful for the Eccles cake, which fortified us as we sat in the waiting room.

But most of all, we are thankful that this is another day and we can be on our way again!

Here are yesterday’s photos I have another blog I will post later