Their story, in their words…
During our walk around the isle of wight we faced many high levels of challenges due to steep terrain that pushed out timings back, however we pushed through with high levels of resilience and strength to get to our finishing points each day.
On the first day we began our journey heading from London to Southampton on a coach before we boarded the red funnel ferry to cowes on the Isle of Wight. This is where we began our shortest walk and passed the historical sight of Osborne House where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert resided during their summer seaside stays. This is where we took a short break to take in the scenery and took time to fix an injury on one of our members’ knees which popped. After a further 3 hours we eventually arrived at kite hill campsite where we spent our night playing card games, looking at local nature like the bull field next door and enjoying the magnificent sunset.
We then set off the next day for our 6 hour walk, we started from Kite Hill and walked through a woodland path before facing a steep hill. Once we reached the top of this hill we saw the car parade of vintage cars heading to Cowes, an annual event for the island. We kept walking towards sandown, this is where we took a very long break due to torrential rain and horrible blisters (classed as a vesicle) starting to develop. After this we continued our walk along the coast where there was rough terrain that had high elevation until we reached Ventnor. Our campsite was inland so we had to walk away from the coast. At the campsite we set up camp but faced yet another challenge because the torrential rain dampened our matches, luckily where we were staying had a hot water machine so we could make pot noodles to eat that night.
The next day we faced yet another challenge walking nearly 10 hours from Appuldocombe to Freshwater Bay. We were really struggling that day. We reached our campsite and took in our surroundings for the final time. We spent our evening at Freshwater Bay and had an early night.
On the final day the walk was extremely difficult. We enjoyed a walk through Yarmouth and carried on along the coast where there was strong winds before we arrived back at the ferry dock. This concluded our journey around the Isle of Wight.
Raising money for charity really motivated us to complete the walk when we felt we wanted to give up and get any mode of public transport to our destination, we just kept pushing.
