The Last Stage

The last stage of the walk is a sedate little bit of bush/lot of road/smidge of beach walking. Now I'm going to describe this painstakingly as even though it's one of the easiest stretches of the trail, it's the one we will feel every kilometre of. This is the one we are walking with 90km weary legs, shredded feet, sore hips and probably a few tears. Or then again maybe not.

So this weekend, Tracy was running the City to Surf, Mia was doing her own thing, and Katie was still in recovery mode from her maybe-swine flu/bad cold, so I headed off on Sunday morning to walk 25km taking in the last stage and a bit more. This stage starts with an easy couple of km through a flat firetrail before coming out into civilisation at our local soccer club grounds, then ducking back into the bush for the last wee bit of bush walking. The trail then pops out onto the main road where it meanders along suburban streets for a couple of km. It's a bit weird after 90kms of bush trails, boulder climbing, stream crossings, to be wandering along past peoples houses with them doing their normal weekend stuff while we look, well, a bit weird. There's a steep stair climb down to the Spit Bridge (actually I'm dreading those stairs as the stairs are very steep, I'm scared of heights and with sore knees and dodgey everything, it could be challenging. A small hill climb after the bridge takes us onto the gorgeous Chinamens Beach, and then after another small climb we come out onto the very popular Balmoral Beach (when I wandered across on Sunday morning, the beach was full of a wine and food festival, nice). After walking along Balmoral beach we then climb maybe a zillion easy stairs, that I'm sure will feel anything but easy at that stage. A short burst through the bush and then a teeny road climb takes us to Georges Height Oval and our finish. The plan is that 4 of us will make it to this final stage, and once we're at this point we will do everything to get all 4 of us to the end. All sounds easy, right?
Our last big walk this weekend, an easy 30kms on the road somewhere round the northern beaches, with a support team meeting on Saturday to get a bit of a plan together. We have our support crew aka the husbands (except for Al in NZ), we kind of know what we need to pack, it's just a case of bringing it all together and working out timings and strategy as a wider group.
14 days to go.