Diary - Km 2962.4
Mavora bogs, autumn colors and the mud of the Longwoods.
At the beginning of this trail you try to avoid mud. You try to keep your feet dry and your shoes relatively clean. Soon, you learn that it’s all a waste of time. Forget your shoes. Forget clean. In fact, forget you have feet at all, because most likely they are frozen from being in cold mud water anyway. Those seconds are spent wiser looking at the views than the state of destruction below your kneecaps.
Look at that moss on tree trunks, at just how many mushrooms are around in the beech woods, at those cute robins eating sandflies, at the fog, the tussock and the fern!
Yesterday I emerged from the Longwoods- a stretch of roughly 30km of pure mud. Legs covered in mud up to my knees and scratched by shrubs, trying to avoid the deepest mud-lakes. In Lithuania people pay to go through “mud experience”. Though nobody comes out of it with a smile as wide as mine was. It was a sunny day, from the top of a hill I saw the coast I spent more than 3 months walking towards, and now I was standing on gravel. Gravel was not knee-deep. That’s it. The hard bit (of more than 2K km) is done. Now just two more days of beach and town walking and I’m done. I already feel like I am.
Me looking at the final stretch of the trail.