Route planning with Dad

4 July

Dad came up on Wednesday night this week to stay over before he and I drove the route on Thursday. On Wednesday night we took the opportunity to meet up with J in Camberwell for a route planning (and beer drinking) session. I think the photo below neatly captures our relative contributions to the enterprise!

Next morning we set off to recce the route by car. Dad needed to work out how to drive between a set of (fairly arbitrarily chosen) meeting up places, 20 in all. At the start we'll aim to meet every 8km or so, which will be roughly every hour. Towards the end we put the meeting up points a little closer together.

I also wanted to look at a couple of sections with a view to running the road rather than the paths. On some that looks good, on some it didn't. There's a section around Darenth where the paths are badly maintained through fields and the lanes are quiet enough to run comfortably. The same is also true near Detling which will allow us to avoid some really steep climbs. There's another section right at the end near Postling where I think we should stick to the footpath (despite the hills) because the road is just too busy and narrow. Those hills, (Etchinghill for the locals) are going to be killers!

All in all a useful day. We probably need one more session with the maps, but otherwise I think we're looking good. Thanks Dad for agreeing to do this and for spending the day pootling through the Kent countryside!