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As usual, April brought a mixed bag of weather so we thought it a good opportunity to get the Yellow Fever jabs out of the way while the rain clouds lingered over head. For this we had to find a Yellow Fever clinic as our doctors, in common with many, does not offer that service. You have to pay for this injection so having found a list of clinics on the web we rang around for prices. There didn't seem to be much difference so we made an appointment and trotted off to a local surgery with, it is fair to say, a degree of trepidation as people say that this injection is uncomfortable both during and after. Actually, we don't know what all the fuss is about as the injection was less painful than any of the others and, perhaps more by luck than judgement, we did not suffer any of the flu-like side effects. Anyway, Yellow Fever card in hand, photocopied and stored in electronic form just in case we lose all our papers we suddenly felt one big step closer to the start line. Alongside this and between rain showers our daily training continued, though now that we were beginning to feel generally fitter we began thinking more about how to maximise altitude gains in our low-lying area rather than simply traipsing the streets for hours on end. Also, given that we were beginning to get used to the loads on our backs we began adding the odd kilogramme here and there to increase our loads significantly beyond what we will carry on the mountain. Our daily ritual of fitting in 60 to 90 minutes of walking continued. We now sought always to walk up and down whatever local hills we could find and to walk circuits of the local area finding different streets to take us up and down those small hills. Even so, we were comfortably keeping up the 15 and 20 miles per week, sometimes as much as 30 miles if we had a couple of good days at the weekend and probably managing at least 500m up and down each week. However, doing nothing but street-walking becomes mind-numbingly boring and we began to long for good weather and an opportunity to get into some serious hills. This happened during the Easter break when we checked the weather forecast, looked at the sky thinking that the forecast appeared a little optimistic, crossed our fingers and again drove over to Wales to re-do the Pen y Fan horseshoe in the reverse direction. Unfortunately our thoughts about the weather proved more accurate than the meteorologists and it closed in with a howling gale, low cloud and intermittent heavy rain shortly after we set off. The day therefore turned into more of a, "having tested the cold weather kit, how about donning the waterproof kit to see how it works", day. So that is precisely what we did and plodded through the gale and rain to the summit, where the view was "exceptional" as in the photo below.
Overall the day was a success. Our kit kept us nice and dry and believe it or not the weather actually cleared not long after we started our descent so by the time we got back to the car we were dry and wondering what all the fuss had been about - typical! What was comforting was that this time we were no where near as breathless as our first trek up the Beacons, so all of that traipsing the streets must have been doing some good - thank goodness!
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