So I thought I already wrote this, but apparently not?? So there is a bit of a mix-up.
Since Donald left, the weather has been more rainy. Tomorrow again the weather will be bad with high wind speed, rain and even thunder in the evening.
I don’t trust my tent in high wind, so I’ll aim to reach a hut before tomorrow night. There are two emergency huts and the furthest is a really nice privately owned hut. The price is actually very decent. So that is my plan, but that does mean I need to cover 65km in two days. But as the weather is shittie tomorrow, I should walk 40+ km today.
So I set an early alarm because based on the information, the terrain will be relatively slow. Thus to cover such a distance I need an early start (again). Wasn’t very happy to get up, but I didn’t want to wake the others. So I packed swiftly and went on my way.
As expected the terrain wasn’t an easy stroll, but I was content with my progress. Near a lake, I passed Joel, who was eating breakfast. He will catch me soon enough! And indeed after 3 hours I took my first (chips) break and he passed me.
The trail became easier and turned into a 4×4 road. Which are a lot faster. Pleasantly surprised I walked into Adolfström. Still early the coffee shop wasn’t opened yet. I needed to pay the hut for tomorrow in advance, so I just had to wait 15 minutes. I wasn’t the only one waiting. Another Dutch hiker was there. This brave soul didn’t have a tent but a tarp construction. Unfortunately, he already discovered that a tarp and the combination of wind and rain isn’t successful as the rain will be blown into the open spaces of the tarp. So he also wanted to stay in the hut.
The lady of the coffee shop could not understand that we both spoke Dutch, and were there at the same time, but weren’t together. This made for a confusing situation especially as she only accepted cash, but he didn’t carry any cash (why??) so I lent him cash and sent him a Tikkie. Eventually, when I booked only one night she finally understood that we were complete strangers to each other. The guy sprinted off to the boat that would take him across the lake (8km walk otherwise). I wanted to walk everything, plus I didn’t want to pay for the boat, therefore I stayed behind got a coffee, and relaxed for a bit. Then it was time for the lake section. Very beautiful, but again not very fast.
A little bit after lunchtime I arrived at the drop-off location of the boat. I enjoyed my lunch there and so far so good. I still needed to cover 20km, but with the long daylight, I had plenty of time.
However, my feet thought differently about another 20km. Those pussy feet of mine were tired and even though the terrain was perfect, I was really slow. So I put some music on and pushed on. The kilometers crept by and finally, I reached the first hut. But still got 15 km to go. Still slow I took a break hoping it would help, but only more parts started to hurt. Now my ankles were painful as well. I took 1 paracetamol (for adults 2 tablets is the regular amount) because I didn’t want to push my body too far. At 36.5km I called it a day. Tomorrow 28km is not ideal, but my limit was reached and for now, there wasn’t a good enough reason to push further.
I set up camp, were many mosquitoes again, so I ate dinner inside the tent and fell asleep quickly.
Zilla-in-the-wild 