ruined shoes?

One of the things I was going to blog about last week but didn't was the weather and walking.

On the bank holiday weekend we got some horrible weather on the Saturday afternoon.  I'd seen the forecasts, but they were quite vague and the weather in the morning was okay.  As I mentioned I worked very late on the Friday so I ended up quite delayed on the Saturday and it was a bit later in the afternoon before I went for my walk.

I had to go down to Sainsbury's to pick up some bits and as I was walking down it was still okay, though you could see the clouds building for a bit of a storm.  Well, as I got to Sainsbury's (it's about two miles away) the heavens opened and I got a bit wet but then headed inside and bought the bits I needed.

When I came out it was still pretty heavy, but I hung around and waited for it to dry up.  There was then a bit of a break and so I thought I would give it a go at getting back.  My route was also quite tree-lined so I was hoping I'd stay fairly sheltered.

Well the first thing was that when the rain came back it was a full-on thunderstorm.  I'm not fundamentally afraid of thunderstorms like some are, but I get a bit nervous when I'm out in one.  Not from a point of view of being hit by lightning, but if it hits a tree or something nearby.  So my route being tree-lined made me quite nervous, especially since my plan to try to avoid getting wet was to shelter under trees.

Now initially the rain wasn't too bad - I've walked in worse and not been fussed.  However, it wasn't long before it was absolutely hammering it down.  I mean, it was monsoon-like stuff with gobbets of rain hammering down.  It was that level of rain where even if you stand under a tree it offers no protection at all as the rain just blasts through.

This step up happened about half-way home and initially I tried to shelter, but it quickly became obvious that I was getting just as wet as if I was still moving.  I therefore set off home and got extremely wet.

I was oddly reminiscent of last year, actually, when I also got stuck in a thunderstorm and got soaked.  At that time I bought a cheap poncho with the idea of carrying it with me if rain was threatened, but obviously I'd left it at home.

I also doubt if it would have sorted the real issue I had and that was that my relatively new walking shoes filled up with water.  The real problem here is that the shoes are too big and I have to wear an extra pair of walking socks (weirdly my shoe size seems to have shrunk with the weight I've lost - I think it may be due to my feet being less wide due to a smaller load being pushed down on them: they're certainly not shorter.  However, I think this means there was a route for the water to seep in having run down my legs.

That might seem extreme, but as I say it was a hell of a lot of rain that fell - it was streaming down me and every single part of me was soaked.

Now these shoes are Gore-Tex, which is kinda waterproof, and they obviously have a rubber soul, and these two things meant that the boots actually ended up acting like buckets - I could feel water squishing about in them and when I took them off they were full of water on top of my socks being wringing wet.

I was so wet it took tree full days for everything to dry out having hung it up with the dehumidifier going fairly constantly.

I was therefore rather worried that I might have destroyed this almost new and very expensive boots, but I tried them out this weekend and they seem totally fine.  I guess because I dried them out thoroughly they're okay.