The Road goes ever on and on; Down from the door where it began;
Now far ahead the Road has gone; And I must follow, if I can;
Pursuing it with eager feet; Until it joins some larger way;
Where many paths and errands met; And whither then? I cannot say.

[JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings]

Tuesday, 11 September 2007

Weekend in Keswick - The Prelude

This was a rearranged camping/walking weekend with a number of colleagues and ex colleagues.

I was the one that pulled out of the original trip back in June, so everyone kindly agreed to rearrange for the weekend just gone.

Alas, when I sent out the final details, it turned out that circumstances had conspired against too many people (really, there were some quite impressive reasons why people couldn’t make it; perhaps they just went to extreme lengths to avoid a weekend with us?).

That planned weekend is now being rearranged again for October.

Not to be deterred, for this weekend, Husband and I went on our lonesome.

We’d already planned to stay at Castlerigg Farm, and as it didn’t strike me that we could modify the weekend to a wild camping one until after we had already packed, we went ahead with that plan – hence it was a car camping weekend (and isn’t it amazing that we can spend an entire week backpacking with a total of 15kg between us, and yet for a weekend of car camping we can fill the entire boot of my estate car? Admittedly, Husband did accuse me of being a bit excessive with five pairs of footwear, although in mitigation, one of those was bought whilst there).

Due to a last minute decision to book an extra half day’s holiday from work (combined thought of pitching Big Tent in the dark and a need to balance my time sheet), we managed to squeeze an extra day into the weekend by setting out early on Thursday afternoon.

It felt like we were going on a real holiday, even though it was only to be three and a half days long!

Still, that’s not the interesting stuff. We hadn’t set foot in an outdoor emporium nor on a mountain by that point.

More to follow…

No comments:

Post a Comment