Beach

They left the aqueduct two hours before dawn, climbing by moonlight into the hills overlooking the port - six men in single file, the engineer leading.

This opening line marks the start of the 13th of these walks. No links to anything, just another book I read recently.

Today's walk can be seen in Google Maps, here if you want. Most of my walks are discoverable in the same place. It was drizzling most of the way, cold enough for gloves for the first hour and thereafter, wet, particularly so once I fell in the sea. After climbing across the granite/schist contact that separates White Rock and Killiney strands, I was walking in the shoals of wave washed glacial till that cover Killiney Beach. I chose the walk to have lots of different surfaces to help train my legs; steep steps, grass, heavy pebble beach and some climbing over huge boulders. Anyway, I needed to catch my breath and decided to take a picture at the water's edge. The undertow sucked the pebbles from under my feet. I had the iPhone in photo mode. Over and in I went, the phone too. I grabbed the phone as a small wave broke over us and it still worked. My rain gear kept most of the water out though my pockets and shoes did fill up. It felt strange after spending an hour watching TV coverage of today's tsunami in Japan.

I walked as far as the Shanganagh River, turning back at the mariners marker I now call Aaronisbent after the griffito in today's photo. I covered 10 km in about 150 minutes and it was tiring because I have not been walking enough. There's barely two months before the Scottish Three Peaks so I need to redouble my training and my quest for sponsorship, now at 63% of our initial £3000 goal, which we had hoped to beat by raising closer to £10,000.