Day 7 Kaikoura to Clarence

Today Rapid & I walked 40.6km Ella walked about 15km.
54686 steps

I think I now understand why I have such bad blisters on my right foot. I was wearing compression hose as part of the recovery for my varicose vein surgery for 6 weeks ending 2 days prior to starting the walk.. For some reason my right foot has swollen after I stopped wearing the compression hose and the shoe is too tight and causing the blisters. Still doesn't give me an answer other than hoping things will sort out with time.

I managed to keep to time today. Instead of eating lunch and taking a long break in the middle of the day I am now taking a 5 minute break every 2 hours and eating a little at each break. I have also pushed my walking pace up a little. I have dropped my target for each kilometre to 10 minutes. I wasn't consistently making it today but I still managed to make up 3 or 4 minutes each hour over what I was doing before.

Today started out quite cool and I was wearing 4 layers. By 10:30 am I had she 2 layers - jersey and parka from the top half. I can take layers off my bottom half quickly so they stay on through the day unless there are serious changes in climate. The walk through to Rakautara was very pleasant after a cool start. After that the weather started to change.

By the time I got to Waipapa Bay it was raining. It continued to get colder and the rain heavier for the remainder of the walk. I had thought about doing some extra distance today since the next 2 days are a little longer and I do want to get to Blenheim branch on time but by the time I got to Clarence I just wanted out of the weather.

There were a lot of seals in the bays along the road but not out on the headlands where a huge swell was coming in. They were often right up to within 2 or 3 metres of the road but would scurry off when Rapid and I came along.

After getting back to town I went shopping for an additional pair of gloves. I was going to buy some more long johns too but they only had icebreaker ones at $100. Paul & I went to the pub with the intention of collecting money but the bar was just about empty. We did drive some Irish backpackers down to the supermarket and back in return for a donation.

Johanna & Lena cooked fish & potatoes for dinner tonight. They have abandoned plans of going to Hanmer Springs and will continue north to Blenheim tomorrow.

Peter de Wit went to stay with his sister this afternoon as he is not sure he will be able to get out of Upper Hutt tomorrow. Also Bluebridge will not confirm tomorrows sailings so Paul may have to stay on for another day.

I am really annoyed that I have had to right this twice as although blogspot said the autosave was working very 2nd or 3rd attempt it had saved almost nothing when the publish timed out.