And then I hit the wall. In case you haven’t been avidly following English weather reports, the south is in the grip of a heat wave. Sunday was hot, but Monday was even hotter, climbing into the mid-80s. Combine that with the fact that I sweat a lot, and you get a guy primed for dehydration and heat exhaustion. And of course this was the sixteenth day in a row that I have walked more than ten miles. I know three days of walking in London without a pack doesn’t count the same, but it counts for something.

So, we started a day that was going to be 21 miles by climbing up into the woods on the ridge above our B&B, and then somehow missed the trail. What seemed like the right path took us far around a field and eventually onto a road, by which point we knew we’d missed the trail and were trying to regain it. We knew the real trail crosses the road, but weren’t sure whether it was to our left our or our right. We gambled, perhaps swayed by the fact that left was downhill, we set out, only to descend perhaps 500 yards and find a sign at a T-junction pointing back up the hill the way we’d come, saying “Bridlepath to South Downs Way.” Sure enough, when we re-ascended, we found that if we had turned left and gone about fifty yards, we’d have been back on the trail. Oh well. Nearly a mile added to the day.

From there on in it was a day of much un-ning and –dulating, with some of the rises and falls more like as-cending and de-scending—that is, steep. We soldiered on, but the cloudless sky, the lack of wind, the rising temperatures and the long stretches on the open grassy tops of the downs meant we were getting the full force of the sun. As the day wore on, a few things started to happen. First, I grew more quiet, reduced to responding to Tracy’s observations with one-syllable responses. “Those sheep really love to congregate under the shady tree.” “Yeah.”

I was, in short, not the best traveling companion. Tracy and I have a good walking relationship; when I started calling for breaks fairly often (every hour or so), she was sympathetic and patient. It is at times like that you get to see who is a good travelling companion. After a blur of walking, we were finally on our final descent into Amberley, where we were staying for the night. We got to the bottom of the valley, and at a point where we knew we were at most a half mile from our B&B, I had to sit down in the shade of a small tree by a bridge. I just couldn’t go another step, and so we rested there for something like fifteen minutes (maybe twenty), while Tracy exhibited calm patience, asking for instance if she should go on ahead, buy a Diet Coke and bring it to me (we still had some water, but not much, and a cold soda did sound appealing…).

Finally, I rallied and we slowly made it into Amberley, where our trail directions were slightly wrong about the location of the B&B. It said it was twenty meters to the right on the first road, but it was in fact about ten feet to the right. We were both so dazed (I’ve made Tracy sound like a cross between an Amazon warrior and Florence Nightingale, but she was tired and thirsty too) that we walked right past it, partly because we saw a pub across the road. Tracy got us pints of diet soda with ice and a lemon slice, which we both agreed was possibly the best pint of anything we had ever drunk. Our B&B hostess, with the memorable first name Boodie, was charming, and had a fan in the bedroom the presence of which very nearly made me weep for joy. In a country where few people have air conditioning, a fan is a blessing. We eventually crawled across the street to dine at the same pub and crashed quite thoroughly for the night. It was the second-longest walking day of my trip, but definitely the hardest. The heat, the hills, the lack of shade make it a blur that I can’t really remember in much detail. There aren’t many pictures, because my photo-journalism enthusiasm melted away with the gallons of sweat I shed.

Total walked: Tracy still calls it 21 miles (and she’s working from her Fitbit), but I’d like to suggest that it was closer to 22 miles. It makes me feel better, so humor me.