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]

Friday 3 July 2009

LEJOG Photos

361 days ago we reached John O’Groats at the end of our Big Walk.

As soon as we got home, I downloaded all of the photos and enjoyed a reliving of the trip by virtue of those images.

A few months later, when looking through the photos for the umpteenth time, I suddenly realised that I had made a grave error in photographing the trip. We had plenty of memory with us, and had a spare camera battery, but didn’t take the charger. Because of not having the charger I was aware of the need to make the batteries last and thus didn’t use the camera anywhere near as much as I should have.

With hindsight it was incredibly silly to ration the photography for a number of reasons. For one thing, we could have sent a depleted battery back to my sister for recharging at any time and for a matter of pence; secondly rationing to that degree wasn’t at all necessary - we didn’t run so much as the first battery flat, so the second one didn’t even get called into use.

It was sometime in the early autumn last year that I was once again looking through the album and it suddenly struck me like a wet fish quite how awful an error it was not to have snapped away with gay abandon. Why did we not have a photo of our B&B room in Welshpool? Why did we not have a photo of 90% of our camping pitches? Why were there so few snaps of wildlife? Why are there so few photos of us? How many times did I think ‘a photo won’t do that justice’ and not bother even trying to capture a fantastic view?

So taken was I with this realisation of the magnitude of my error that I was all set to go and do the walk again, setting off right that minute, this time with a never-ending supply of power and intended to take all of the photos I missed the last time. Alas, Mick restrained me from my impulsive plan…

So, anyway, all of that waffle aside, some 11.95 months after completing the trip, I’ve finally got around to uploading some photos from the trip and putting some captions on them.

I’ve only up-loaded a selection of the photos – 131 of them – so it won’t take dreadfully long to view it. In the captions I have preceded each one with the day number, and it’s quite noticeable that entire days went by without there being a single photo worthy of making the final cut.

You can access the photos by clicking here or on the photo below and then clicking on ‘slideshow’ (near the top, on the left side of the screen). If you want to be able to read the captions and have time to look at the photo, then I would suggest that you need to slow the slideshow down to 4 or 5 seconds per slide (control the timing via the bar at the bottomn of the slide show).

LEJOG April 08

Right, think I may go and buy another couple of camera batteries now so that I’ve got no excuse on our next big walk!

3 comments:

  1. Caption: "Mick's arm and brown willy"...

    Ooe Er!

    Great Pictures you two! Thoroughly enjoyed them.

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  2. What great pics, many of which I recognised of course. Like you I just want to set off again.

    I have a Cannon Powershot that runs on two AA batteries. I took about 500 pics on one set of Lithium AA, and in any case it is always easy to replace these batteries. I think this is about the only small digital camera available now using these sort of batteries - it is a little more bulky than the rechargeable types.

    One thing a friend of mine says (he is a journalist)is that the most interesting pics are the ones showing the bad things that happened, but of course unless you have the paparazzi instinct taking a photo under those circumstances is usually the last thing on your mind, but its worth trying to remember.

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  3. Excellent, Gayle. I'm not surprised you want to do it again - crossing the M5, watching Mick eat massive poos and drink pints of urine...no wonder the poo shovel went missing! Fantastastic scenery, as well...

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