When I was growing up in Mission City, British Columbia, my mother had her go-to method for tenderizing the cheap cuts of meat that were some of our staple groceries.

She had a big mallet with a brilliant green handle. The head of the mallet was a solid block of wood with cross-hatching on one side and carved ridges on the other. With this thing firmly in hand, she would bludgeon the meat to its final death, before frying it beyond recognition.

My mother, it must be said, was a wonderful baker. Cooking? Not so much.

And in retrospect, I think she pounded those things longer than necessary, perhaps getting out a little pent-up good Mennonite-wife angst? Just a thought…

You might be wondering what this has to do with our fifth day of walking Offa’s Dyke Path? It’s just that every single day of this walk, I find myself thinking about my mom and her meat-tenderizing method, because I swear my feet feel like those hunks of meat must have felt; smashed to bits by that same mallet.

I know I’ve been wanking on about my knees, but by the end of the day, my other screamin’ focus is my feet.  All that is left to do is dip them in egg and breadcrumbs and sizzle them in oil….which, of course, brings us to the Arrowbank Lodge in Kington, England, because they have redeemed my feet.

I have just had a lovely bath, Jill & John have fed us tea, and fresh-from-their-oven scones, and my feet feel plumped back to almost-normal. I feel like I am capable of once again walking to dinner at the nearby Oxford Arms.

But before we go for dinner I am going to come clean on how we got here and exactly what happened today…

It started off promising. We went to P.S.M. Outdoors so Kevin could buy new boots and we could acquire some more rain protection. Our weather was starting to look rather dodgy and we thought it best to be prepared. (Kevin’s boots are a whole other story that will be left for another time.)  We also wanted to meet the proprietor, Peter Mayall, as he had sponsored our walking sticks for the Offa Ordeal 🙂

Boots purchased, rain hats and new socks acquired, we set off at 10:30 a.m., our latest start yet.

Tra-la-la-la, through fields and meadows and glades – with no rain at all! – and finally, after about 10 kms, at around 1:00 pm, we stopped for lunch while the wind howled around us. That is when I discovered.. I no longer had my camera.

And this is also when Kevin knew that he had truly married me for better or for worse, because we now had to retrace our steps back, and back, and back, almost to Hay-On-Wye , past the requisite cows, the bleating sheep and the massive oaks, back until we got to where I discovered the camera dangling on the fence at Bettws Dingle; our morning snack stop (as an aside, ‘dingle’ is a Welsh word for ravine).

Which is when we called Anna from Drover Holidays, who whipped over, met us on the nearest road. It was now almost 4 pm, so she took us down the road to Gladestry so we could walk lurch the last seven kms in to Kington.

So. We climbed up to the gloriously windy moorland turf of Hergest Ridge, past more sheep and roving horses and finally walking down into Kington with about 22 more kilometers of worn-off shoe leather…just not exactly scuffed off in the exact order it was supposed to happen.

When this whole walk is finished in another eight days, I’m still going to tell people that I hiked the whole thing. Purists be damned.