This was the last day of walking on Anglesey and a devilish walk, it was, too! At first it wasn't bad, just a little bit rainy, only then it got a lot rainy and I could not figure out the route. You had to turn, but there seemed no place to turn. There was the beach, but this was not walk-on-the-beach-beach. "Turn left," say your devices but you cannot see where. You walk back up the road, it is raining harder, Your GPS acts funny in the rain and you curse it, you put on your poncho, you look, you wonder if you missed a subtle turn, you walk up the road again, and repeat this cycle several times. FINALLY you spy a pice of stone just above the beach, which leads to a little path, and you breathe a sigh of relief—because this exercise has taken the better part of an hour— and then you realize you have no poles! You go back to the place where you put on poncho; you remember this place well because you wondered why the little building had no eaves under which to stand, but poles are not there. You walk further up the road yet again; this is about the sixth time. No poles. You decide, OK, I am going to continue without my poles and hope I don't need them today, and THANK GOD I brought a spare pair.
As you are walking along in the rain, the thought comes to you that, "Hey, guess what? I could order a back up pair of poles from Amazon and have them sent to the next place I will be staying for two nights, which is about 10 days from now." You think this because once or twice you have almost dropped a pole off a cliff and there are many cliffs to come. Then you wonder, do they carry these Z racing poles here in the UK? Why, yes, they do, it turns out, only you cannot find your size and aren't you happy you brought that little tape measure, granted, for a whole other purpose, so that you can check the length of your poles, and finally, after searching several vendors at Amazon, you find one pair. Check with B and B to make sure it is OK to send poles to them. It is, so you do, only to receive message from Amazon that they don't like your credit card. You re-enter number, this time with a space between the sets of digits, and, finally, get a confirmation. Meantime, you have signed up for *free* Prime trial here in the UK and decide you will worry about the details later.
Back to the walk. You have already walked an extra hour, when the next impediment impedes.
And behind her was a horned one:
You learn that cows will not respond to your throwing a stick because cows, unlike dogs, do not play "fetch." The critters will not move. Granted, they are not that big, not as big as the huge field of huge cows who were two inches behind me a few fields ago—yes, I was scared; there were so many and I could hear them breathing, snorting, more like, pero bueno—but they are a lot bigger than are you!! Finally, I approach and cow jumps over low barbed wire fence, so clumsily that I don't know how one ever got over the moon. Second bovine, having horns, was less inviting, but I had to ignore that and get closer so that s/he would play follow the leader. Eventually, it, too, went over to other part of the pasture.
I am too out of steam to describe the further travails of today, but let's just sum it up by saying there was a lot of city walking beside very busy roads, and at the end of it all, though flat, the 14.5 quoted mileage added up to 18+ miles.
Across that water, on the distant shore, is a pair of Black Diamond Distance Z poles. If someone the right height finds them, won't they be lucky!!
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