County Durham man walking 250 miles and camping out for homeless charity
Connor Aldridge and his friend Tyler are raising money for MK Homeless and Community Support
A man from County Durham says he's taking on a huge personal challenge walking to Milton Keynes to raise funds and awareness about homelessness.
Connor Aldridge and his friend Tyler Fitzpatricks will be camping out along the roughly 250 miles after setting off from Great Lumley near Chester-Le-Street yesterday.
It's to raise money for MK Homeless and Community Support, which was set up by Tyler, to help homeless people get what they need and hopefully get them off the streets.Â
Connor said: "He's just taking time out of his day, literally every single day, just to help out the homeless. We spoke a few months back and we just said, as a joke first, or maybe it'll be a good idea as a laugh, we'll walk from Durham to Milton Keynes, you know, and it turned very serious, very quickly.
"We're walking from here to Milton Keynes and for each city we pass, we're going to use the money raised to help the homeless in different communities; new tents, new equipment, new sleeping bags, like if they need new clothes, just anything, and just things to help them with the heat as well, you know, like keep them fed, clothed.
"We're going to just take the back route. It's a very scenic route. We're going to pass through central Durham and we're passing through York and you know I think we're passing Leicester and Nottingham and all places like that just until we get back to Milton Keynes.
We're walking, we're hiking, we're not taking any shortcuts, we're not going to any Airbnbs or anything like that. We've literally got a sleeping bag, we've got like a very small tent like each and we're just going to rough it until we reach Milton Keynes just to bring awareness to what homeless people are going through.
"I just want to thank my friend who started this charity, Tyler, and just all the good he's done, he's got quite a number of people into rehab and he's got them into housing, so he's actually got a few people off the streets just in the few months he's been doing this. I just want to really take my hat off to him."
He says his wife, who's looking after their 5 children as he's doing this challenge, has been a huge supporter.
Connor and Tyler will be doing live streams documenting their journey on their Facebook page.
Their fundraising page is here.