Passport. Bus ticket. Plane ticket. Train ticket.

Check.

Backpack. Clothes. Boots. Trail snacks. Water bottles.

Check.

Camera. Extra memory cards. Notebooks.

Check.

Credit cards. Cash. Teef. Clown nose.

Check.

OK, then.

Looks like it's just about time to hit the dusty.

I'm on the bus in a few short hours for an evening flight out of Logan.

With any luck I should be having breakfast somewhere in London tomorrow morning before catching a mid-day train to Wales.

I'll drop off in Chepstow, stash my goods at a little inn, and scurry a few miles south to the Sedbury Cliffs above the River Severn and the start of the Offa's Dyke Path coast-to-coast route across Wales.

Then it's back to the village for the evening meal and quite likely a pint or two. And sleep.

On Saturday morning I'll begin the walk in earnest, heading north for 180 miles along the Wales-England border, through farms and fields and forests, villages and hamlets, over windswept mountains and lonely moors, past castles and pastures of sheep, to the Irish Sea some 15 days hence.

A pilgrimage of sorts, yes. Long days to stretch and stride. And to let the eyes see and the mind wander and the heart pump...

It'll be good to be back on the walk. Oh so very good.

I'll be in touch as I can.

See you in a few weeks.

"I often wonder what I seek when I embark on these trips. There is the pat answer I tell people I don't know--that I'm interested in seeing a place, learning about its people. But then the trip begins, and the hardship comes, and hardship is more honest: It tells me that I'm here because I don't have enough patience yet, or humility, or gratitude. So I've told the world that it can do what it wants with me if only, by the end of the trip, I have learned something. A bargain, then. The journey, my teacher."
--Kira Salak, Mungo Made Me Do It, National Geographic Adventure, December 2002