A Modern Day Hobbit Adventure
Mission: Take the ring of power to be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom in Mordor!
Using the modern technology of Google Maps, I located Mordor to be on the outskirts of Essen in Germany. I also located a Rivendell and Isengard in Holland, plus the village of Bree in Belgium. It was only a matter of time before a journey was plotted and adventure could ensue!
Now, in this modern age, it would be all too easy to simply book a flight to Germany, or at least get a train to somewhere a little closer, but I wanted to show just how much we are capable of using just our own legs. Something that would have been seen as ordinary 400 years ago, but unthinkable today.
How/where did you sleep?
Short answer: wherever I could.
Long answer: Hotels and hostels were an ‘occasional’ option, however I only had a minimal budget on me and I thought it better to save a bit of money for things like food if possible. So for this reason, I carried with me my lightweight, minimalist camping kit:
- Gore-tex bivvie
- Travellor 1-season sleeping bag
- Small inflatable mat
- Lantern
- Emergency survival accessories (whistle, compass etc…)
I slept in forests and general wooded areas most nights. These were surprisingly easy to find when you select your route well to include trails.
What did you eat?
I ate mostly from budget supermarkets where I could, with the occasional cooked meal if the price was reasonable. The key was to get enough calories in, without forgetting the vitamins and minerals that allow our bodies access this energy.
A typical supermarket trip would include:
- Bread (either fruit or multiseed variety if available)
- Milk/yoghurt (something with protein in it)
- Water
- Fruit or veg
What did you do for money?
Now that’s a good question!
It’s not that easy booking a month off in any job; certainly not ‘paid’ time off. I’m not sure there’s a job out there that would cater for this. As I’m self-employed, booking time off was never going to be the problem, but the difficulty is you know there is NO money coming in while you’re away. I just had to save up what I could and prepare to be right at the business end of my overdraft when I returned. I reasoned that ‘Future-Dan’ could worry about that rubbish.
Were you raising money for a charity?
Yes, I was raising money for my local hospice, which is a really important cause for me. I hoped to raise an equivical amount to what I might have earnt had I stayed at home and carried on working.
In the end, we manged to raise a very respectable £723 for the East Cheshire Hospice, so my sincerest thanks to everyone who donated, and especially to the all those who I had only just met on my journey and donated what they could. That made me very happy.
The Journey Itself
As we speak, I am busy typing up the full story from my many notes, to be released later this year I hope. It was an amazing experience with highs and lows; I met some truly awesome people along the way and discovered some unbelievable trails to run along in areas you wouldn’t expect.
Here are the blogs, broken down into three bitesize parts with pictures and video:
PART I: A Modern Day Hobbit Adventure – Days 1 and 2 (writing credit: Sam Mayers)
PART II: A Modern Day Hobbit Adventure – The UK Section
PART III: A Modern Day Hobbit Adventure – Holland and Beyond!
Thank you for reading! 🙂
