The Southwest Coast Path, Cornwall, England, 2015 by Linden B. (Lindy) Sisk

Final Thoughts on the Walk, The Southwest Coast Path, Cornwall, England, 2015

This is the final article in a series on a walk in England. For the rest of the articles, click here.

So, one might ask, why do we do this? We spend months preparing for a trip of this magnitude, both in planning — much of which was done by Tristan and Alex MacDonald, but on our own as well. We walk hundreds of miles preparing, if we want to be in condition to complete the trip. We spend thousands of dollars, fly across oceans and continents, to go for physically taxing walks involving long miles, often with vertical gains and losses of thousands of feet, sometimes in bad weather. Is this torture?

Well, no.

Speaking only for myself, here are some of my reasons.

On these trips, life is reduced to simple elements. Get up each day, dress, pack, eat breakfast, walk, eat lunch, walk some more, and at the end of the day, drink a beer or two, shower, eat dinner, go to bed. Life is free of a lot of the complexity and trivialites of modern life. On this trip, I had a TV set in each hotel room, which I never turned on. I had books on my phone, and never read any. At the end of the day, all I wanted was food, and to sleep.

A major motivator to me is to get to see sights which are not available to those who cannot walk. If you have looked at the pictures I posted, you know. If you want to see what we saw, you must get off your ass, and start walking.

There is also the camaraderie of the group. With the exception of Ian Hicks, I had walked many miles with the people on this hike, some of the walks spread across three continents, and Ian proved to be as entertaining and stalwart a companion as the others.

There is also the not-inconsiderable satisfation of having achieved a difficult task. This walk would see us complete more than 125 miles of walking, with a total elevation gain and loss of more than 25,000 feet. That's an average of more than 2,000 feet each day we walked, the equivalent of climbing the stairs of a 100-story building — and then walking back down — every day. And some days we exceeded 5,000 feet.

And now we are home, back to our normal lives. Someone pointed out in a book read long ago, that those who have climbed tall mountains retain the memories of what it's like at the top, and it changes their lives, in ways which those who have not will never know.

Thanks to my stalwart companions, Wilf Cameron, John Tesdorpf, Sally Dietterle, Ian Hicks, and especially Alex and Tristan MacDonald, for another great experience afoot. Let's do it again sometime, somewhere else.

If you want to see what else we have done, see my travel page