I had promised my wife that I would be home by 3:30pm today so you can imagine my surprise when at 3 ½ hours in to my walk, and with what I thought was about 60 minutes to go (plus a 75 minute drive back home), I checked Google Maps on my cell phone to find that I was about 2 ½ hours away from Shorne Woods in Kent, where I had started at 10am, and where I had left the car.

It was Saturday again today – parkrunday.  And I decided to head over to Kent to do the Shorne Woods parkrun that I hadn’t done previously – it was my 74^th different parkrun but was almost cancelled due to dangerously icy conditions.  Fortunately the run director was able to move the start and alter the course slightly to enable us to run, and I ended up with my fastest time since November (22:27).

My intention was to then do a four hour walk alongside the Lower Thames up to the Dartford Bridge then across to Dartford to link today’s walk to last Saturday’s on my ever growing map, before heading back to Shorne Woods by road – which I thought would take me about an hour.

The walk up the river had taken a bit longer than planned, but as with last week I got to see some sights that many Londoners will never see and below are a few photos I took along the way.

As a result of my mis-calculation I ended up walking 50km (31 miles) to give me my third 30+ mile walk in eight days and one of the highlights of today’s walk was that I was able to comfortably walk the 50km on very little nutrition – having only taken two packets of raisins and a mandarin with me for what was supposed to be a four hour walk.  I also had one sachet of Generation UCan before I started walking.  This is a product that I am really starting to like.

Once again, due to work commitments I am unlikely to do much walking this week. Last week I got out for two shortish nighttime walks in Richmond Park.  I don’t know what this coming week holds, but am looking forward to our second Bushy Park overnight 50 miler starting at 7pm next Saturday.