I finished the 2012 UK Circumnavigation on a grey, windswept
and soggy day. We laughed and smiled on
the beach, we chatted with friends. The trip was over, the UK had been paddled.
And then we left that
final beach and we were back at home within half an hour. It was a bit of a
shock after such an intense experience, so many highs and lows.
It took a long while to settle back in and to reflect, but
beneath it all there remained an emptiness, a hole. It’s hard to explain, but
somehow the job wasn’t done properly. Somehow I thought I should have done
better; not that I should have gone faster, people would expect that, but that
is not what I mean. Just for me in my personal performance – it’s hard to
explain, but I just felt that I should have just done a better job of the whole
thing. It niggled... There were questions still to be answered too.
I didn’t tell anyone that I would go again, not even myself.
But it was just as inevitable as the first time around was. It would happen one day. Slowly the ideas formed and in May 2015 that day arrived.
