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The next morning my knees were swollen and swollen, and the pads of my feet, when I put all my weight on them, seemed to catch fire.

“I hope you’re not as bad as me,” I said to Emma as I limped to the bathroom.

“Oh, it’s not,” she said.

But when I got out of the shower five minutes later, I was pleased to notice several Band-Aid wrappers poorly hidden under crumpled paper in the trash can.

“Emma?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“How bad are they?”

“Not as bad as your knees.”

She seemed proud of it, but it was true. She only had a small wet bubble on the tip of each pointy toe and another on the side of her left little toe.

“I’m leaving with a number of cautious but optimistic band-aids,” she said.

When I asked her how she got blisters while wearing the same shoes she’d been running half marathons in all spring, she slipped on a new pair. waterproof running shoes” – cue ominous drumming – and said, “Writing your middle name with wet feet.” »

We stuck to the plan anyway, going two more miles to look at a semi-famous rock where many of my British climbing heroes had climbed, estimating that the third day would still be the shortest of our entire walk, barely 9.7 miles.

This turned out to be a bad idea.

Four miles further on, when we reached the top of the 1,500 foot climb to Lining Crag, we were dismayed to run into the oceanographer and his wife, as it implied that we would have to conceal the fact that we were in sharp decline.

” How are you ? » he asked.

“Hard to complain about these views,” I said, pointing to the valley, which I only then noticed was invisible behind the fog.

He smiled, then invited us to walk with him. His wife wanted to talk about American politics and English politics, but when it became clear that we were all on the same side, the oceanographer got bored and said they would stop for lunch. “Oh, and by the way,” he said, “the best thing to do when your feet hurt is to take off your shoes.”

Take off our shoes? But that meant stopping! Instead, we continued. By mile seven, I was driving Emma crazy saying “youch, youch, youch” with every step.

When we finally came across the pretty little village of Grasmere, dominated by Wordsworth’s tourism, as he is buried there, I was almost in tears. As I lay on the floor of our hotel room, elevating my throbbing legs, I performed two rounds of mental calculations. First, we had covered 48 miles – instead of the 35 suggested by Wainwright’s book – in three days. Second, even if we continued on the shortest route possible, we still had 90 miles before our rest day six days later.

I relayed these facts to Emma as she applied Neosporin to her oozing blisters.

“In a very American way, we seem to have underestimated the mountains of England,” she admitted. “But we can slow down, Steve. We can take breaks.