Ragged Cap Runner: Hiking The Avon Trail: Hike One

Yesterday, I set out to begin this summer's end-to-end Avon Trail adventure!
The Avon Trail starts in St. Marys and runs northeast for 111 kilometers, until it finishes up in Conestogo. It provides a trail link between the Thames Valley Trail (which I hiked end-to-end last summer) and the Grand Valley Trail.
Yesterday's plan was for Doralyn and I to drive our vehicles to where I hoped to hike to, drop off my car there, and for Doralyn to drive me to the start point, in St. Mary's. I had picked a drop-off point that was about 18K from the start. The Avon Trail provides you with maps and directions and they have all the access points marked off. Yesterday's Map 1 would have involved a 20.5K hike and I wasn't sure if I was up to hiking that far this early in the season.
The first problem we ran into was actually being able to access that 18K parking area. We started out driving Highway 2 headed east, looking for Line 29, going north, which would have taken us to that access point. Well, about halfway up Line 29, we discovered it was closed for an emergency. This necessitated head farther east, to Line 31, which then took us north to the 2o.5K access point. So, I was going to be doing a 20.5K hike whether I felt I was ready or not!
We left my car there and Doralyn drove me back to St. Marys. We parked at the tennis courts and I found the commemorative marker which marks the end of the Thames Valley Trail and the beginning of the Avon. I then set off.
Before I had even walked a full kilometer, I began to feel a "hot spot" forming on the ball of my left foot, generally an indication of a blister beginning to form. It was a minor irritation at first and I thought that if it got any worse I would find somewhere to sit down ad apply a moleskin to it from my first aid kit.
St. Marys is a pretty little town and I was able to see parts of it I had never been to before. Fairly quickly I was out of it, though, and walking country roads, on my way to the Wildwood Conservation area. By the time I got to Wildwood, my foot was bothering me enough that I decided to sit down by the dam and apply a moleskin. As I was rummaging through the kit, it started to pour rain so I quickly just grabbed a band-aid and slapped it on. It didn't help.
From there, it was into the conservation area, following along the banks of Wildwood Lake. I ran into a bit of an issue there, following the blazes. The Avon Trail uses white blazes, Wildwood Conservation uses blue ones, which is not a huge issue but the blue blazes and markings all seemed to be shaped differently and some of them were just random numbers, painted on trees. This wasn't too much of a deterrent, it just meant I had to stop and double-check more often than usual.
And it was in Wildwood that I spent about 20 panicky minutes thinking I might be lost. The mileage on my Garmin didn't seem to match up with the written directions on the map. On top of everything else, it was getting past supper and I really wasn't sure I had enough daylight left to get back to my car. I kept checking the Garmin and yanking the map (which was by now in tatters) out of my pocket until things started to fall into place a little more in my head. I realized I was where I was supposed to be and, at the same time, also realized I had plenty of daylight left. Whew!
At then end of it all, my legs and feet were in bad shape. The band-aid had done nothing to alleviate the blistering and I knew, even as I continued to walk on it, that it was going to be pretty bad. Which it was. I have never had an issue with blisters while hiking and I obviously will need to do something different the next time out.
What I will say, though, is that there was some amazing hiking involved! A good portion of it was city and country roads but even these were nice. There was much tree damage (lots of wind and ice storms lately) on the trail portion and this necessitated some minor re-routing. Even the damage itself was kind of pretty!
The following is a bit of a photo dump, just proving that I walked the walk! Cheers!