It’s 6:00am on Saturday morning, and my alarm goes off. This is fine. I have my kit all packed and my clothing laid out on the table, folded in a little pile in my usual slightly obsessive and organized manner. I drag myself out of bed, put David Crosby on the stereo(RIP), get dressed, and get ready to wander down to the station to meet Sam, Cam, and Andrew.

We’re about to do a big weekend of walking in the hills and I feel I need a decent breakfast. I decide to grab a plastic pot from the recycling pile and take some muesli with yogurt and honey to eat on the train. Somehow in my morning daze this takes way longer than I realize, and when sauntering down to the station I get a call from Andrew: ‘Are you on your way?’ He seems reasonably relaxed but I detect some concern in his voice and realize that my timing is off, and it’s much later than I had thought. Now I’m running full gas down the road with a 50L backpack on having only been out of bed for 20 minutes and feeling a bit groggy. Andrew is sweet-talking the guard to make sure the train doesn’t leave without me. I jump on, all good.

In the few minutes that follow, several people compliment me on the quality of my last-minute breakfast, and I feel at ease that it was worth nearly derailing the whole weekends schedule for.

We’re due to meet Ayoob at Temple Meads before catching a train to Merthyr Tydfil, from where we’ve planned to walk up the valley and around the Pen Y Fan ridge, camp somewhere, and carry on down to end in Crickhowell on Sunday. You’d assume most of the storytelling and excitement would come during the hilly midsection of this journey but in reality it all kicked off from the get go.

I feel a bit bad making this public here, but it started off badly for Sam, cyclocross legend, planner of savage bike rides, and grip wizard, who lost one of his nine lives and his illusion of ultimate grippyness by falling down the stairs in the station. This was one of those situations in which you sort of want to piss yourself with laughter but also hope your friend is ok. Luckily he was fine and so the pissing of selves was acceptable.

Next up in the morning of calamities to be ruthlessly outed on the internet is Andrew who managed to somehow lose his train ticket within about 10 minutes of buying it, only to lose another one before our change at Cardiff. You really couldn’t make this up, But it gave us all something to laugh about. I looked after his third ticket at this point, just to be safe. I’m planning on keeping it as a souvenir.

At this point, I should explain that our plan for the weekend was to turn our phones off on arrival in Merthyr, use no GPS, and rely on a couple of OS maps for the duration of our walk. This forced return to analog methods was great on so many levels, but I particularly enjoyed the way it made routing a group task, taking it in turns to carry the map, keep an eye on the route, and being able to gather around it and view the route as a group. This is so much better than following one person’s phone or GPS. We rely on technology every day of our lives and it’s refreshing to put it to one side for a bit.

We intended to head out of Merthyr along the Taff Trail, which is where we met a chap who I’m going to refer to as Aled. Aled was a stout man in his 50’s walking a large husky, and was initially very helpful to us in pointing out a diversion on the trail. But this was where his helpfulness ended. He was heading in the same direction as us, and proceeded to bark instructions and commands at us in a thick welsh accent for the best part of half an hour. There was no escaping him. He informed us very confidently that his dog liked ‘The Girls’, and that he himself also likes ‘The Girls’ he then made the assumption that we all liked ‘The Girls’ very much too. In hindsight at this point I wish I’d put my arm around Sam for a second just to see his reaction. We got through the diversion and onto a long straight section of the Taff where we knew we could turn up the pace and hopefully leave him behind.

This was all going to plan until a brief stop for a snack and for Ayoob to change out of his thermal leggings. It was at this point we saw Aled again in the distance, shouting commands to us once again. There was only one thing for it, we decided to make a run for it, leaving Ayoob half-dressed at the side of the trail being yelled at by our increasingly close crazy new friend. Fortunately, this would be the last we’d see of Aled, but his overenthusiastic fondness of ‘The Girls’ and somewhat aggressive yelling of directions will stay with us for many years.

The main Pen Y Fan horseshoe loop was beautiful, but the sheer number of people around did detract from it somewhat. This is one of the most popular walks in the area, and while it’s genuinely great to see more and more people appreciating the outdoors I do quite like getting away from people on this sort of thing rather than pacing along ‘motorway’ engineered paths. Given the number of people about on a chilly weekend in February I’d have little interest in walking there in the summer months. We’d headed up late in the day with the plan of finding a camp spot, and settled on a little plateau just above the saddle between Pen Y Fan and Cribyn. This would be a terrible place to spend the night in bad conditions but we were blessed with it being remarkably still and I was able to lay in the tent looking out at the twinkling lights of Brecon in the distance.

Having been all about the bivvy bag until recently, a few more multi-day trips on the horizon got me thinking about having some more space and luxury, and this was my first time camping in my fancy new tent. A bivvy bag is great for one or two nights in good weather, but I don’t fancy spending a week sleeping in one. The tent was quick and easy to set up and I did find it very satisfying to cook my breakfast from bed and be able to change my clothes and sort my gear out in a bit of privacy.

On day two we carried on along the ridge and down towards Talybont Reservoir and to a surprise encounter with certified legend of gravel cycling Katherine. This really was a crazy coincidence, as we saw her on what was pretty much the only bike-friendly section of our route, which was only a few minutes long. Madness.

From here it should have been an easy-going ramble down the final 8km of canal path into Crickhowell, but these last few kilometers were to feel much much longer after the elevation of the morning and the previous day. We must have looked a sorry state plodding along having lost all coordination of our legs. By my mapping guesstimations, we’d covered a fair bit of ground and were all feeling the effects. I love this sensation of being totally finished like you’ve gotten everything your body is up for giving you. Although saying that I only love it a few hours later when I’m sat at my laptop typing away, I’m not so sure I loved it in the moment of those last few miles!

The last little highlight of the weekend was our train ride home, where we ended up sharing our carriage with a bunch of pissed-up Welsh rugby fans singing ‘It’s Not Unusual’ by Tom Jones. Normally I consider loud drunk people on trains to be nothing but bad news, but it felt like all of the passengers were enjoying (or at least tolerating) having these chirpy old Welsh blokes on board, and they couldn’t help but make me smile. This may also be because I secretly really love Tom Jones.

Over and out until next time. I’ve not got much in the calendar for March but am putting together some big summer plans as part of the continuation of my ‘1⁄3 life crisis’. More info TBC