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 22 June 2018

The Crops of Güglingen; The ParkRun of Stuttgart

Just a very brief post to mention a couple of barely-worth-mentioning walks, mainly for my future reference:

Güglingen
We arrived in the small town of Güglingen, which sits between Mannheim and Stuttgart (Germany), on Wednesday, when the temperature was too high and the air too still to contemplate doing any exercise in between the hours of 9am and 8pm. Our exploration of the area, via the longest of the three advertised local routes, was therefore left until Thursday, when the temperature was a little cooler and the breeze much more in evidence.

It was such an exciting and inspiring walk, that I can't think of anything to say about it beyond the two paragraphs I posted in our daily travel witterings:

...we set off to walk the 10km circuit I'd downloaded from wikiloc.com yesterday.

That took us through a large variety of fruit and cereal crops (including lots of apples, blackcurrants and huge quantities of grapes), but it was all on tarmac. There was hardly any traffic (off the top of my head, two motorbikes and one tractor passed us), as despite the tarmac, most of these 'roads' were really farm tracks.

That's one serious picnic area! We grabbed the table in the shade for our coffee and cake, and repeatedly had to fish bits of tree/blossom out of our cups.

The elevenses view was mainly over vines

When the route became indirect in its latter stages, we cut short, as we couldn't see that the final distance was going to show us anything we hadn't already seen. Having started/ended at Bertie, and with a detour through the town on our way back looking for a milk-selling shop, we still managed to exceed the advertised 10km.


Stuttgart
Today's walk only gets a mention due to the amusement value of having set off to walk 1.5 miles by way of a recce of the ParkRun course that I intend to run tomorrow (only 1.5 miles because it's a two-lap course) and finding ourselves walking 4.2 miles before we were satisfied that we had found the right set of paths. We were left in no doubt that the track as downloaded from the ParkRun website is wrong - because what it shows is just not possible without bashing through trees/brambles/undergrowth - and that is not the ParkRun way.

The track as downloaded from the ParkRun website

What we walked before we were happy we had found the right route

Forutnately it was no hardship to do the extra distance, as the course runs through some very pleasant woodland. Unfortunately, I completely failed to take any photos, and it's highly unlikely that I'll pause mid-run tomorrow to do so either (hopefully I won't have to pause to catch my breath either, but it is the lumpiest course I'll have ever run).

3 comments:

  1. I am keen to do a twelve miler, but forecast for next few days is in mid to high twenties - a bit of a put off. I can't remember cancelling a walk because of heat, but have often suffered as it has developed during a walk. Perhaps you might try flying round your next park run?

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/dnm02gksrvdd5mn/GayleDuck%20copy.jpg?dl=0

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    Replies
    1. We have, of course, many times walked in higher temperatures than the 30-odd degrees we had on Wednesday, but (I think) only on backpacking trips where the imperative to keep moving forward outweighed sitting out the heat (if that was even feasible - not a tactic that would have worked in the Mojave desert). When it comes to day walks, I would be far more likely to go out in the rain than in that sort of heat.

      Hope you get more suitable day soon for your 12-miler.

      I'm afraid I couldn't view your link. Even though I'm on wifi just now, Dropbox and my phone don't seem to like each other.

      Delete
  2. I have done a revised version and sent it by email.

    ReplyDelete