Day 2 - Melbourne to Coalville

Today we started at Melbourne Hall at 5:30am. Emmanuel was struggling to walk bare foot because his feet work swollen underneath and painful under the toes. So he tried putting a bandage on it but it kept coming off, so he decided to put some cream on his feet to see if that made them feel better. The road from Melbourne was very rough and there was no pavement so he eventually decided to put some flip flops on to protect the soles of his feet for the first part of today’s walk. We were very concerned that if he didn’t do this, he may be unable to continue with the walk.

Along the Melbourne route toward Staunton Harold we had a near miss a car that was overtaking from behind us. As we was walking on the right hand side facing oncoming traffic, the car was travelling very fast – maybe 80 miles an hour and its wing mirror missed us by only inches. I was really scared to walk along that road after being narrowly missed so we decided to walk along the grass verge until we reached a footpath.

Val, our day co-ordinator made our job easier today, looking out for us. We took some pictures of some different places. We took a photo of the sign saying “Leicestershire”.

We also passed a herd of cows crossing the road on their way for milking. We could see cars queued up ahead and we wondered how they would pass the cows. As we got closer, we could see that there was a “crossing” which the cars were waiting for to open.

After completing the day's walk, we visited the Stephenson College in Coalville and a church group in Ashby-De-La-Zouch. At this point, we were all very tried. The reception that we received however was excellent and well appreciated.

(Written by Khumbula Dube)