Why a new blog, Julez?

. . . is what you may well be asking if you are a reader of my other kind-of-regular-but-not-as-regular-as-I'd-like blog Julez's Unexpected Gap Year. Well, my last last post to date on that blog said that I'd had a . . . "fabbo idea" was the terminology I think I used. Well, I decided that instead of cluttering up my other blog with stuff about this idea, I'd make it into a new blog.

If you are a follower of mine on Twitter, then you may have noticed me tweeting about "training walks", and you may have wondered what I was on about. Equally, you may not care, in which case why are you reading now?

Well, now all is to be revealed:
Inspired by (among other things) Into The Wild, lyrics from numerous songs mostly by Frank Turner, Eddie Izzard running all those marathons, and the concept of geohashing, - and by being bored with sitting on my posterior all day long - I have decided to go for a Walk. Note the capital W.

Yes, the idea is to leave my house earlyish one morning, and walk around England, staying at Youth Hostels (and people's houses - if you live somewhere not near me, expect contact from me at some point). I'm preparing a route at the moment, using the marvel that is Google maps, and the YHA's maps (which you can't access outside their website - very frustrating). At the moment I don't know how far I'm going to be able to get, so I've only planned as far as Bristol via some lovely locations on the way, but hopefully I'll get a bit more than that out of it.

My plan is to publish my map and send out tweets from my phone on the way, as well as (hopefully) a short blog each night for the non-twits amongst you. I'm about to try being very technological and sort out a hashtag box on this page (incidentally, the hashtag will be #julezwalks) so you can have everything in one place.

That's enough nattering from me for now I think. I hope you're all vaguely excited for me :)