Rambling into Retirement

Julia and I had been married for nearly thirty years before we discovered that we both enjoyed recreational walking; not only enjoyed it, but harboured secret ambitions of walking long distances. For many years, I had dreamed of walking from John O’Groats to Lands End, walking through my native land, and hopefully getting to know it better. But this was small fry compared to Julia’s plans – she wanted to walk from our home in Stoke-on-Trent on to the pilgrims’ route to end up in Santiago de Compostela!

So, in 2010, we felt that the time was right to move on from our cosy rambles which were designed to get us to our starting point (Stoke-on-Trent is well placed with good walking country in all directions), out on a walk, usually with a pub lunch thrown in, and then home again, all within the light of one day.

For our first longer walk, we chose The Staffordshire Way – ninety-odd miles in our own back garden. Its great advantage was the proximity to home – if our knees or toes were aching or if the weather was downright horrible, we could hop on a ‘bus or ring for a taxi and abandon the project with little cost but for our hurt pride..

This website is a log of our longer walks. Whether this leads us to complete the John O’Groats to Lands End walk or even the pilgrims’ route to Santiago, we’ll have to wait and see. These logs will be short on facts but full of opinions; obviously they are not designed as guides to the individual walks. However we hope that visitors to the site will glean some useful information if they are considering embarking on one of these walks.