A Week of Uninterestingness

For three days after returning from Scotland we did very little.

On Monday (when the weather was still extraordinarily warm and I was exclaiming “Glad we’re not out backpacking in this” along with regular repetitions of “Isn’t everything green?”), I came to have a need for ice cream. That could have involved a just-under-2-miles walk into the village and back, but what’s the fun in walking 2 miles along a pavement when you can walk 7.5 miles, taking in paths, tracks and the canal, in order to visit The Ice Cream Maker? Jolly tasty ice cream it was too!

On Tuesday the only vaguely outdoor related activity was taking Mick’s sleeping bag to the cleaners.

On Wednesday I lost an entire day plotting our next Big Walk, an activity that I didn’t quite finish because there were a few bits I was struggling with in the absence of proper paper maps. In the midst of all of the plotting, I also took delivery of a Montane Venture Jacket (I blame Louise – she told me I’d made a mistake when I resisted buying it weeks ago!).

On Thursday we walked to the library to get the maps that I needed to finish the first-cut of the route for the next Big Walk. The library is 7.5 miles away. We possibly would have both crumpled before the 15 miles were through (we were both hurting far more from this flat, easy, unladen 15-miles than we did on any day of our K2CW), except that it was only a tiny detour to return home via The Ice Cream Maker (where the servings were far more generous than they had been on Monday).

On Friday I mailed back the Montane Venture Jacket. As much as I liked it, and as much as £90 was an excellent price, it didn’t fit me. Nowhere seems to have a bigger size available at a bargain price, so I won’t be getting a replacement.

On Saturday I went swimming. My legs have moved back and forth to the exclusion of any other movement for the last 2 months, as a result of which my hips were truly baffled by the breast-stroke movements!

On Sunday I did my ‘shuffle around the block’ walk, for the first time since February. About a third of the way down the overgrown track, I gave up trying to beat my way through, figuring that it was going to take me half an hour to cover its very short length. I didn’t give up on the walk though, instead trespassing through an adjacent field. The rest of the route involved a lot of long grass, but was perfectly pleasant.

Today would have been another 15 mile outing, but that plan was scuppered with a failure to get out of bed at anything approaching a reasonable time. Instead an 8.5-mile geocaching walk was hurriedly planned. We found all of the geocaches, but could sign none of them; we’d forgotten to take a pen. Tomorrow I will visit them all again (although likely taking a 4-mile route – today’s was intentionally made longer than it needed to be), properly equipped.