Walking to Sri Lanka (one step at a time).

On Saturday 8th October we took the bus to Nine Mile Burn and began the second leg of our journey, this time with just Duffy the Dog in tow. Mojo stayed home with the girls and his heart condition. 😞 I hope we weren't responsible for that. He's 14 and has a heart murmur. Now every day is a battle to get him to take his heart meds (sigh. It generally involves sausages, famously great for the heart of course, him having rejected the chicken and fish options). But we still have him, 6 weeks after the vets were vehement that we should have him put to sleep. And he's in amazingly good spirits. Long may he reign. We are using an app, Komoot, to plan our walking routes. Komoot (inspired name) has the whole of the UK and beyond mapped for walking and cycling. So where that other well-known mapping system would take us along the highways, the straightest routes, Komoot sends us off the roads, meandering through the countryside wherever possible.          ...

A few years ago I randomly put Sri Lanka into a global mapping app and was amazed to see that I could walk there in 78 days and 5 hours. Sri Lanka is where my father was from and the place to which Robert and I travelled in 1999 on board a cargo ship, my father having taken the opposite journey when he came to the UK in the 1960s. Robert and I got married in Sri Lanka, in a yoga retreat in the jungle on Christmas Eve 1999, a child having suggested the idea 2 days before. We took our daughters back there in 2014 and we're always madly keen to return, finances and the current political situation not withstanding. Before 1999 I had only been to Sri Lanka once, aged 11, when I met the Sri Lankan side of my family and fell in with a crowd of cousins who introduced me to fireflies and plantain chips amongst many eye-popping wonders, after a suburban upbringing in north London where flying ants and Wotsits were more my norm.    After the 78 day walking revelation, Robert and I got ta...