If you’re just joining this blog, last summer I kayaked from near Cherbourg to Genoa. The trip came to an abrupt end when I had some issues with my heart. Since then, all I’ve wanted is to start the adventure again. A couple of weeks ago my cardiologist said I could.

I’ve found these seven months of waiting hard at times, and I’ve visualised the day I that I would start the adventure over and over. Today I realised that vision.

At 8.00 I walked down the drive and gave one final wave back to mum and dad, no goodbye feeling good enough. I stepped on to the road, a road that I’ve trodden for twenty years, but that this time leads to endless possibilities. I looked around me, knowing I’ll miss this beautiful place I call home. A cool breeze was blowing but I was sweating under the weight of my pack by the time I walked up out of the valley.

I’m not going to Italy to start an adventure separate from my life, but rather my life is adventure. For me, this is the message that starting an adventure from your door represents.

I enjoyed the walk down the hill past Wayford, but when the first car approached, a lady in a land rover, I didn’t have the courage to stick out my thumb. The next few cars didn’t stop and I’d walked 3 miles when Sarah pulled up in a pickup. She drove me to Beaminster, passing her dairy farm on the way, and dropped me off in the square.

A steady stream of morning traffic came through the small town, and it wasn’t long before Chris picked me up. An industrial paint salesman, he was driving to Bridport to hassle a naughty client that hadn’t payed up. Chris had hitch hiked around Europe with a surf board, so had some empathy, and maybe was repaying some karma. He apologised for his rattly car.

He dropped me in Bridport and I walked down to the A35. This road was busy and I bottled it for a while, walking up and down the pavement, crumbling under a wave of self-consciousness.

But then I remembered that no one actually gives a damn, and even if they did give a damn, I shouldn’t give a damn. So I surrendered my ego, stopped taking myself so seriously and stuck out my thumb.

Hitch hiking is such a great exercise in rejection. For half an hour, I was rejected by every car.

But then Alice stopped and excitedly told me she’d take me to Dorchester. I was very happy. Alice was going to the station to catch a train to London. She told me how to say ‘the lifejacet is under your seat’ in Italian and played music by Fat Freddies Drop. She apologised for her smelly car.

Alice dropped me tantalisingly close to the train station, but I navigated my way out of Dorchester to a suitable hitch hiking spot. After 1/2 hour of rejection I lost faith in my spot and decided to walk to a cafe in a layby a few miles up the road. The road being too busy, I went cross country, and soon found myself trying to cross a impregnable nettle filled hedge in an effort to evade a big green tractor that was coming after me, or at least was in my imagination. I followed a badger run into some woods and lept over a barbed wire fence to escape the farmer, but a large black cloud duly opened above me, and I was soaked to the skin as I waded through a field of chest deep grass.

I arrived at the cafe dripping, mud squelching between my toes, my shirt covered in seeds, and my legs angry red with nettles and brambles, as if I had some highly contagious tropical disease. What hope did I really have of anyone accepting me in to their car?

I thought my contrast against the spotless cafe would highlight my resemblance to a dog, so I stood next to the toilets instead. With low traffic flow and limited bites, I gave up after an hour and resigned myself to repeating the aforementioned journey back through the fields.

Returning to my original spot, the train station was beckoned. But just as I was about to give up and spend sterling, a taxi pulled over. What a lesson in perseverance. I’ll remember to always have faith that my taxi is just around the corner.

‘YOUR A TAXI’ I told the taxi driver. ‘YES’ she said. ‘OK’ I said, and climbed in to the front seat. I wondered if my mother was the driver in disguise when she said Portsmouth was the destination – just where I wanted to go! This suspicion was quickly forgotten when the driver started talking about virtual reality gaming. Anonymous taxi driver was going to collect medical samples from Portsmouth hospital. We chatted non stop for the whole 1.5 hour journey. I’m now an expert on the taxi industry, Bristol nightclubs and of course, VR gaming. Seriously though, thank you so much for your generosity anonymous taxi driver.

I walked about an hour to the port of Portsmouth and booked a ferry. It would’ve been fun to sail across the channel but my blistered feet, lacerated legs and aching, bruised back didn’t fancy the extra hour of walking to the marina for the slim chance of someone leaving to sail the channel tomorrow and accepting an incompetent liability on to their yacht.

My boat leaves at 23.00 and arrives at 7.30 tomorrow in Caen. Tonight I’ll inhabit the bar and use my networking skills to hopefully pick up a good lift off the ferry.