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

So, today is the second day of our pilgrimage. Yesterday was hot and demanding, then we went home and spent the evening (and he morning) scrabbling around trying to finish off all the other stuff we needed to do before leaving our home until the end of October…..

We started a bit later today and had full packs on for the first time.

Yes, they felt heavy. Yes it was hot. Yes it was hard, despite a shorter distance today (only 11.5 miles). The shade was less today, despite having looked at the map and guide and expecting it to be better.

We walked to London Bridge station and travelled to Erith where we headed to the Thames river front. The wide estuary and the industrial sense of the place gave it a particular character and the huge bridge spanning it was glimpsed there and appeared at times as we walked on.

We walked past many recycling centres, scrap metal dealers and engineering plants. Nature and smelly human industries segued along our path as we made our way along the path.

I am almost never dismayed by industry as it rears up on either side of our path. Like Alison, I am glad that people are being employed, that things are being made and distributed and that waste materials are being reused, etc. Walking on roads where all of the vehicles are heavy goods vehicles and are in a hurry can wear you down, though, and if they are excreting a steady flow of high temperature air and smelliness in your face, it does wear you down.

But then we moved onto the route of a river with a less industrial hinterland and there was more shade, too. It became a chalk stream that both fed large reservoirs of fresh water and served as a place to fish and enjoy the cool waters as you picnicked by its banks. And we walked by it to our night stop.

So, the last couple of days have been the first of our pilgrimage but have they felt like the beginning of a pilgrimage?

I suspect that some people would have found them challenging but for us it has been good.

We understand how beginnings work. It is not the job of the beginning to be the thing it will become.

But each new beginning gives you some of the tools you might need to complete the journey. It gives you the space to start to be the people who will make it to the end.

And it begins to reshape the dynamics of who you can be together.

So, I say, let’s see how far we can go from her…. We are happy to continue to go and find out where we end up.

The pictures start from Erith Station and end up in Horton Kirby. Tomorrow we walk to Wrotham and then go on a few miles to the only accommodation we could find.

Glad that tomorrow will be cooler as we have 15 miles and a few hills to climb on the way…

and here is a post script – the rusty metal figure with one of his arms up in the air represents Mick Jagger a famous son of the town of dartford….

The blog today is just to put a marker in the ground and let people know where the blog can be found. So, nothing poetic or profound, just a note of the day and some photos.

Today we left our home at 7am and joined the pilgrim way to Canterbury, which is the first phase of our pilgrimage.

The route aims to follow as much of the original pilgrim way from Southwark to Canterbury as possible and, surprise, surprise, the original route from London takes you along major roads that have been in use since the early middle ages or earlier times. So, we walked down the Old Kent Road and ploughed our way through New Cross, Deptford, and up Shooters Hill to Blackheath, then on to the edge of Thames Meade where we encountered Lesnes Abbey (where many pilgrims stopped) and on to Erith.

Because Erith is both a day’s walk (15.5 miles from our home) and also 20 minutes train ride from our home, and, because there is not much in Erith to keep us, we came home for the night and will head off to Erith first thing in the morning to continue our journey and will not be back home until the 25^th of October (we hope).

As it was expected to be one of the hottest days of the year, so far, many of our friends and relatives didn’t want us to start today, but we have booked our ferry crossing and intend to walk with care, in the shade and only in the mornings and early afternoons.

Significant sights along the way today were the North Peckham civic centre (now the church of everlasting arms) with amazing mosaics featuring Chaucer’s pilgrims, but sadly, these are poorly preserved. Next to this odd building is the longest pub sign in London which no longer has a pub below it and has been declining steadily ever since we first noticed it about 10 years ago.

At New Cross we walked past the site of the terrible fire on January the 18^th 1981. Please look it up if you are not familiar with this. Prayers are still needed here, as is justice.

After Deptford we began to climb Shooters Hill which is probably London’s longest hill. It does it in a mix of long steady inclines and a couple of steep slopes. It cuts across Black heath, which is lovely but, when you get to the very top (near the Bull pub) you can turn back and glimpse a fabulous view of central London. Not in my photo from that spot the dark line above the city. That shows the pollution held over the centre of London as a thick, dense layer…. We were well beyond it when this was photo was taken.

Lesnes Abbey has a great centre beside it where we could get a cold drink and sit in the shade listening to a play being rehearsed in the hall next door – Ally in Wonderland – due to be performed there in early August. Sounded good!

In the Abbey grounds there is an ancient mulberry tree planted in time of King James the 1^st of England (6^th of Scotland). His big idea for this and a very large number of other Mulberries was for the nation to get into the silk trade. Sadly, Silk worms don’t eat black mulberry leaves, they eat the leaves of white mulberry trees…. Ho hum.

The day was really varied, starting with really urban walking, then over a great London heath and eventually through a council estate and mixed suburbia. Then we dropped into a couple of large wooded areas and some wide open spaces with parched, yellow grass, and after an encounter with ancient ruins that allowed us another long view of the city, we were into a very mixed, urban backwater that eventually brought us to Erith train Station. The last sign I photographed was at the beginning of a neglected dead end side road, but it lifted our spirits… I hope these photos give you an idea of the day.

Hi, we are Ian Smith and Alison Gelder.

We are pilgrims who have a bit of experience on long pilgrimages but really do feel that we need to keep doing more!

This year we want to walk to Rome from our home in Central London but, with Brexit, we can only spend 90 days in Europe, so we may not get there. We have walked to Rome before on a different route which joined the Francigena at Sarzana, so every day we walk beyond that point will be a bonus.

As we will not know how far we can go until the later stages of the pilgrimage, we have adopted the title “How far can we go?”

The answer at the moment is, we don’t know, so you will have to check us out as we walk and find out the answer some time in October!