Last night we sat down to work out the route of today’s stage from Cumberland to Mike’s house in Columbia. I soon realised that we had a problem. However I tried to route us, the miles were showing up to 170 – some way from the 105 I had on my schedule! It turns out in the planning when we’d been altering destinations along our route, I’d managed to keep in one of the previous finish points instead of the actual one.

Fortunately on these trips we always build in a bit of slack at the end so that we can cope with any problems – even ones like this. We eventually found a route that was either 126 miles in one go (doable, but hard). But we’ll probably find another hotel for tonight and split our final leg into two more manageable 60-something miles on each day. We’ll lose our spare day tomorrow, so probably no trip to Baltimore – but it won’t affect our sightseeing in Washington DC.