Day 25: Malmesbury to Darling

Strange how your body reacts during an endurance event when end is almost in sight. With just two days, and around 60kms to go, everything suddenly goes a bit pearshaped, as if your body already goes into shutdown/recovery mode.

As has become the trend the last few days, we again find it difficult to get going, finally hitting the road around 7:00. Suddenly the 36km distance, which looked easy in planning, seems like a huge mountain to climb. Still, as they say, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, so we set off, at each kilometre marker just aiming to reach the next.

While the day started cool and overcast, the clouds soon disappeared and we faced another hot day with almost no shade along the way. We made it to the 20km mark before breaking for lunch under almost the only tree en route, which unfortunately stood on the Darling Cellars grounds, so we had to climb over a fence to get to it. This made lunch a bit stressful as we kept expecting someone to come prosecute us for our tresspassing ('Private Property - Tresspassers will be prosecuted' signs seem to be a popular bit of decoration on every fence and wall in this country).

Somehow the kilometres passed faster than anticipated, and we got to the T-joint where Darling Road joins Old Darling Road (3km out of town) around 18:00. John Mills, owner of Daisyfield, our sponsored accommodation for the night, met us a bit later just outside town to take some photos for the local Darling newspaper, and then kindly took us for a drive through town to show us all the sights, including the famous Evita se Perron.

Aside from offering us a free night in the stunning Daisyfield Guesthouse, our hosts Barbara and John went out of their way to make our stay a highlight of our trip. We were treated to a lovely braai and some choice wines from the region. Barbara also gave us fruit salad, joghurt and muffins for breakfast, which was wonderful as we missed the Darling Spar the previous evening.

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