Anorial, good to hear from you again. I was wondering just today where you had gone off to.
Tomorrow is March 17, the day on which the Eowyn Challenge site had hoped to gain 225,000 miles in all on their database. Looks like they got that and more besides!
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133 miles, just past the Barrow Downs
Many odd things have been happening since I learned of the real reason Frodo left the Shire. I had not been intending to pass through the Old Forest, but it it became necessary if I wanted to stay with the hobbits. Queer things happened there, but we had a brief rest at Tom Bombadil's House. It was a sorrowful thing to bid him farewell, but now we are once again in his company, as he has rescued us from the stranger things that happened.
The Barrow Downs were sheerly terrifying, the terror that comes not when you come face to face with some hideous creature, but when you have the overwhelming sense that there is
something there, and you cannot see it. The fog was thick and seemed to wrap around me, trying to clutch me and smother me in its waving folds. I had not expected it to be as it was, for as we approached we were on green rolling hills, with a fair sky above us.
The terror of the thing that had us entrapped I cannot think to describe. The only other thing that has ever sent such a cold chill to my heart was the strange cry we heard in the woods when we were still in the Shire. If it had not been for good old Tom, I tremble to think what would have become of us.
Bree is not far off now. We have begun to move more swiftly as we feel danger pressing on us, going at an average of about five miles every day, and sometimes six or seven. Rivendell is now only a little over three hundred miles away... how glad I will be to get there!