Very well appointed rooms at The Star and also, it would appear, very recently refurbished. We’re back in the bar for breakfast by 7:30 having all ordered the large cooked option yesterday evening. Large turns out to mean double portions – to include a plate of 8 hash browns for the 4 of us. John doesn’t approach this with his customary trencherman gusto and confesses to not feeling 100%, which he thinks might have something to do with last night’s curry.
We check out and set off at 8:30, and reach yesterday evening’s finishing point around 15 minutes later. Today’s planned route isn’t particularly long – a tad over 12 miles to St Peter’s Chapel which, after Bradwell, is the last place for several miles where we can turn inland and reach a convenient meeting point (i.e. a pub) for a pre-ordered cab. We make reasonably good progress over the first couple of hours in bright and increasingly hot sunshine. Again, the grass bank along which we’re walking is well maintained and when, half an hour from the start, we get back to the Blackwater at the Steeple Bay Holiday Park, the path eastwards is relatively direct and inlet free. After those first two hours, we’ve just passed through St Lawrence. This has involved a minor diversion to negotiate the streets of a riverside housing estate, and being told (indeed urged) by a couple of local residents to ignore an upcoming sign announcing that a green stretch of land leading back to the river is private property. We follow that advice without inflaming what seems to be a rather controversial local issue and continue towards Bradwell. However, John’s progress now starts to slow quite significantly, and this isn’t because of his dodgy toe or his earlier dodgy curry diagnosis. It’s not clear exactly what it is, although there is a suggestion that he might have caught a bug from a niece at the family gathering over the weekend. In any event, he isn’t feeling at all well and we need to stop on two or three occasions for him to rest in the shade and recover sufficient energy to walk a little bit further with his rucksack being carried by others. It’s readily apparent that we have to finish today at the first convenient spot – i.e. somewhere to which we can redirect the cab – which is Bradwell Marina. We reach the Marina Bar at 1 o’clock having completed not much more than 3 miles in the last couple of hours. Ben and Gary pop inside for a drink, John sits outside in the shade, and David shuttles between the two whilst arranging for the cab to collect us from the Marina. Fortunately, it’s able to get to us within half an hour after David’s call, and it takes another half an hour or so to return to the Heybridge Basin car park.
John is still feeling unwell, but there is a marginal improvement in his condition. On our arrival at the Marina, he was considering spending the night at David’s house rather than travelling home to Gloucestershire by train. However, by the time we’re in David’s car on our way back to Witham, he’s decided that he can manage two rail journeys and a trip on the tube in between. And so, having bid fond farewells to David at Witham station, the other three of us catch a train to Liverpool Street from where Ben walks to London Bridge so that he can travel to join his family for a few days away in Kent, while Gary joins John on the tube to Paddington and then continues homeward.
POSTSCRIPT 1
John establishes through a PCR test that, if he has indeed caught a “bug”, it’s not COVID! He continues to improve to such an extent that, by the end of the week, he is proposing that on our next two day trip in September we should be walking anything up to 36 miles!
POSTSCRIPT 2
Following his session with the consultant, Mike will be having a right hip replacement. The operation is currently scheduled for the beginning of October and although this means that, as anticipated, he will be absent for the rest of the year, the consultant is confident that he will be fit and able to rejoin the walk in early 2022. Fingers crossed.
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