Mick holding first-born Grandson for the first time:
He’s five days old now (Josh that is; Mick’s a tiny bit older!), and weighing in at over 10lb at birth, is a big lad for his age.
He was declared, before our arrival, to be the “most perfect baby in the world” and having met him, we are inclined to agree.
Congratulations go to Nick and Holli (the doting parents of whom we failed to take a photo with Josh – but hopefully they’ll send some through soon).
Having announced that I was taking myself out for a walk this morning, Mick asked where I was going. I gave the matter some thought and reeled off four options.
A while later, as I laced my shoes and put on my jacket, I still hadn’t made a decision but surprised myself by asking Mick whether he could give me a lift down the road to the next village. A fifth option had apparently popped into my head, which would have been dismissed for the certainty of being chased by three large horses. Getting a lift 3 miles down the road would avoid the horse situation.
As I set out into the gloom a few minutes later, it occurred to me that my concern about the horses had prevented me from thinking through the rest of the route and the fact that it often features cattle, sometimes of a troublesome nature. It also passes through some areas popular with dog walkers, so killer dogs were a further danger.
Just as these thoughts were in my mind, a dog suddenly started barking ferociously about three feet away from me. Having returned to land after leaping six feet in the air, I calmed myself as I realised that the killer beast was securely behind tall palings.
Minutes later I was looking to be doomed to be a nervous wreck when I heard hooves stampeding behind me. Looking over my shoulder I identified the source of the sound as four horses, and gave myself a good talking to as, being on a narrow green-lane, it should have been quite obvious that they were safely in an adjacent field.
It seemed inevitable after such a start that I would come face-to-face with the hugest bull known to man upon entering the first field.
Happily, all of the first set of fields were empty and even more happily all of the dilapidated and missing stiles have been replaced with sturdy new ones.
The 7 miles didn’t all pass off entirely smoothly. Although the only cows I encountered were so small as to be no threat at all, I did have not one but two dogs turn from their owners and stride out at top speed towards me. Both turned out to be less threatening than their approach suggested. The second one turned out to be very friendly indeed – so much so that it left a lovely muddy paw-print on the front of my bright orange jacket.
Anyway, enough words, here are a few (poor quality) snaps:
Into the misty gloom
Friendly cows
Swans and ducks organising themselves by colour
I like this bridge-bridge-lock combination on the Trent & Mersey, but I’m sure that I’ve got better photos of it
The water in all of the local ponds was remarkably low
That we didn’t get a ‘You’ve got a place!’ email wasn’t a surprise, really, given that we hadn’t entered. But, now that we’ve taken part and understand the attraction of the Challenge, there was a tinge of sadness that we had chosen not to join in the fun next year.
Mick had been all for applying, and for a while I had entertained a plan whereby we worked the Challenge into our K2CW (albeit with some assistance of motorised transport).
Mick remained enthusiastic about that plan, but the more I thought about it the more I dismissed it. Amongst other issues, the biggest argument in my mind was that by delaying our progress north by over two weeks we would be putting ourselves more firmly into midge territory during midge season.
Besides, who in their right mind would incorporate a TGO Challenge into an End-to-End walk?
So in 2010 we will be enjoying the TGOC via the blogs and reports of others. And, in 10 months from now we won’t be dithering; that application will be going straight off for the 2011 Challenge.
(This is a missing post. Typed on Friday evening, it should have preceded the last two, to explain where we were and why. It’s failure to materialise in the right order was entirely operator error (pressing ‘send’ always helps…))
"I'm going to take you away for the weekend" announced Mick a couple of weeks ago and it didn't take me too long to work out that the occasion prompting this was our wedding anniversary.
"Where?" was my natural response, but Mick maintained that it was a surprise. He wasn't even drawn in by my probing questions.
It was the apparently innocent statement of "We'll travel down on Friday" that led me to guess the location - much to Mick's consternation. It was the word "down" that did it.
"Down?" I repeated "Not up?". Mick tried to back-track. "Warren's Farm?" I asked. Mick looked sheepish. I grinned.
We discovered Warren's Farm in Yeoford (thank's to Vic's assistance at short notice) during our Big Walk last year and it maintained its 'best B&B' ranking throughout the entire trip. We not only vowed to return, but as a result of some comments in the Visitors' Book last year we quite fancied sampling one of Winnie's (the host’s) famed three course meals.
We arrived at the farm on Friday afternoon
We had a different room this time, but once again it was large, comfortable and full of character (and it had a bath in the en-suite, making me rue not having that room last year when the bath would have been even more welcome).
The evening meal was superb, even if there was enough food to feed a family of six hungry people.
We were absolutely stuffed after the main course (and yet struggling to stop eating whilst it remained in front of us, so tasty was it), and then came the dessert. With Winnie being Belgian it had seemed wrong to request anything other than the Belgian Chocolate Mousse, and it came served in two very large bowls.
I took a couple of mouthfuls and found it to be very rich indeed and declared that no-one could possibly finish a whole serving. Mick, however, was making a brave attempt, and possibly would have made it except that in the end I suggested (for his own good) that he stepped away from the pudding.
Later we reclined in bed complaining that we had eaten far too much. I wouldn’t hesitate, next time we visit Warren’s Farm (for I’m sure that there will be a next time), to have a meal here again (albeit next time I will take a bottle of wine to make use of the redundant wine glasses that were curiously part of the place setting).
A fantastic B&B, with a fantastic host and plentiful tasty food. Bliss!
(subsequent note: After Winnie’s excellent breakfast on Saturday morning I was so absolutely full that I skipped lunch and tea and didn’t suffer from any hunger until Sunday morning – almost unheard of for me!)
Fortunately the mishap didn't occur too early in the walk. We had already walked from Meldon Reservoir and up Sourton Tor before pausing briefly to watch a running event pass by.
As my photo from the top of Kitty Tor showed, visibility up there wasn't great, but it was better than we got for our next objective.
Being woefully lacking in fitness our plans for the day weren't fixed and from Kitty Tor we thought it likely that we would take the easy option of tracks back in the direction whence we had come. A surprising (to me anyway) level of energy remained when we reached Kitty Tor, however, so we took the more interesting route to yomp pathlessly over to Branscombe's Loaf.
A significant amount of murkiness persisted which made the yomp all the more interesting (compass in hand, "to that tussock", "which tussock?", "that darker one" pointing in the direction of any number of tussocks of various shades).
Our navigation proved good (in contrast to earlier in the day when a brain-fart (or plain rustiness) saw me struggling to remember how to take a bearing) and after wading through much bog (oh how magic my GoreTex socks are!) we found ourselves back below the cloud, exactly where we needed to be.
Past a large herd of tiny ponies and normal-sized coos we went, then steeply down to join a path that would lead us to the path around the reservoir.
"How long does it take to walk around" a heavily necklaced woman asked as we skirted the south-east side of the reservoir. "You have just walked around, haven't you?" Well, technically we had but I don't think that our route was the one they intended. We gave them the benefit of information read from our map and they merrily continued.
Thanks to having taken a detour in the morning to buy an emergency map case (having failed to pick one up from home), we ensured that the threatened rain would hold off, and so it did.
A mighty fine walk it was too. Women in heels and necklaces, old chaps in shirts and ties, runners in skimpy shorts; sunshine, mist and murk; paths, bogs and yomping - and freakishly warm for the time of year. What more could one ask for?
Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange
I will post the full itinerary separately, but here’s a rough outline of the route that we’re planning to take from Kent to Cape Wrath:
*If memory serves, I’ve shamelessly stolen Martin’s route, or a very close approximation thereof, to get us from Ripponden to the Dales Way
** Like the Cape Wrath Trail, the Highland High Way is not an official route but just one described in a book. That book is long out of print. Eventually I decided that I wanted a copy of it. Out of print books tend to demand quite a lot of money second-hand. Never before have I paid that much for a little guide-book!
For the last six months I have travelled up and down the M40 an average of once per week.
As many will know, the immediate vicinity of the M40 in the Stokenchurch area is the home of a large number of Red Kites*. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of journeys I’ve completed without seeing a single one and on a sunny day can easily see a dozen or more. They can be quite distracting too – a truly magnificent bird soaring high over you deserves a glance – but sometimes they swoop low over you too and it’s difficult to keep your eyes on the road when they’re right there in front of you with fantastic colouring and the constant balancing-wiggle of that tail.
This afternoon I could have had a real treat if there had been somewhere for me to pull over to observe (tsk – why do the hold ups occur at inconvenient times, rather than when there’s interesting stuff to look at**?), for there off to the west of the carriageway was a ‘swarm***’. I couldn’t do an accurate head count, passing at speed as I was, but I would say that there were at least 15, if not 20, of them gliding around together.
Only once before have I seen that many playing together. On the other side of the carriageway was a singleton. I wonder what that one had done to be ostracised? Or maybe it just hadn’t noticed that there was a party going on a hundred yards away?
A couple of miles further on and another singleton was spotted. Single amongst other Kites that is, as it was being mobbed by crows****. Unlike the displays of crows versus buzzards, which I’ve always witnessed to involve much ducking and diving (plus the occasional bit of retribution when the buzzard gets fed up with the attack), the Red Kite just continued soaring, apparently unmoved (or at least that’s how he appeared in the few seconds he was in my view).
The Kites do seem to have made a remarkably successful comeback, particularly in around that bit of the M40. Let’s hope that they spread further afield too, so that more people can enjoy them.
* For anyone who is not familiar with the bird the foolproof recognition tip that my late father (who was a bit of a birder) passed on to me was that it’s the only bird of prey with a forked tail. The ‘fingers’ of the wing feathers are also quite distinctive.
** Not entirely true. During a ‘trapped in motorway hell’ sitting-with-engine-off-for-hours incident a few weeks ago I did have a Hercules circle me quite a few times before, right in front of me, throwing half a dozen chaps out of the back who duly activated their parachutes to drift gracefully down to ground. Then I twiddled my thumbs for another hour and a half.
*** Swarm?! What is the correct collective noun for Red Kites anyway?
**** To me a ‘crow’ is anything that’s big and black. I have no clue about distinguishing a crow from a jackdaw, raven or such. Similarly birds of prey are generally BBJs***** and anything like a sparrow is a LBJ******.
*****BBJ = Big Brown Job
******* You can work LBJ out for yourself can’t you?
From Kent to Cape Wrath it is - or K2CW as I’m calling it for short.
The initial seed of a plan started to form when I was watching the weather forecast shortly after returning from John O’Groats last year. Whilst Mick was looking at the bottom left and top right and thinking “That’s a long way we just walked”, I was looking at the opposite two corners and cogs were starting to turn in my head.
For a while very little serious thought was given to the route, planning and logistics, other than to look at a map and try to decide where the bottom right hand corner lies (and if there’s an officially recognised answer which varies from our start point then I would rather not know!). With it proving a bit tricky to decide exactly where the south-east corner of Britain is, I decided it was our walk so it was our prerogative to pick the point that looked to be: (a) a reasonable contender for the ‘bottom right corner’ award; and (b) reasonably easy to get to; and (c) reasonably pleasant to walk from. The winner was St Margaret’s at Cliffe, just up the coast from Dover.
A few weeks back the planning finally began. As it had taken me a year to plan our LEJOG route, and with our planned start date only a handful of months away, it seemed like time was of the essence. As it turned out the planning was much simpler than LEJOG for various reasons (but that’s a subject for a different post). Last weekend I finished tweaking and declared that we have a route and an itinerary (which isn’t to say that there won’t be changes, but with one fifty-mile exception I’m reasonably happy with the route that we have).
Here’s a rough approximation of our route (very rough – I’ve sketched it without reference to a big map with place names on it, so it’s based on the version of Britain that’s in my head):
We’ve even picked a date out of the air on which to start: 2 April 2010*.
I’ll talk about the chosen route, and will publish the itinerary, separately.
(*usual disclaimer applies: I am female and thus at liberty to bring that forward).
We never set out to walk the lengths and breadths of Britain.
On 7 July 2008, when we reached John O’Groats, our ‘lengths and breadths of Britain’ map looked like this:
Still we had no master plan. Then, about this time last year, I came to fill in the TGOC application form and got to the question of “Why do you want to take part in the TGO Challenge” (or some such similar wording). I gave that some thought. One reason was because quite a few people had told us that we should. Another reason was that having walked the length and breadth of England and the length of Scotland it seemed like a good addition to our collection of lengths and breadths.
So, by the end of May this year, the map was looking like this:
Being gainfully employed this year, having already taken most of May off, and with the length of Wales being longer than can be squeezed into a few days, we put that one on the back-burner and instead concentrated on the easy option. Every year a mad bunch of people walk across Wales in a day, so it looked eminently achievable for us to walk across it in a long weekend. Hence in early August this year our map had gained another line:
…to be continued…
On Sunday we spent an uncommonly long time perusing Carlisle castle (often in the rain).
Had all gone to plan both this and Monday's itinerary would have been with Ma-in-Law, in consideration for whose interests we chose the location for our long weekend. Alas, she was taken poorly at the last minute, so it became a holiday for two - but we stuck with the planned touristy activities nevertheless.
Monday was fortuitously dry (mainly) and before opening time we were at Vindolanda waiting for another dose of culture.
Once again we proved that we have the ability to spend longer than most examining things historical - so much so that we were running out of time to visit the Roman Army Museum and having bought a joint ticket we felt obliged to go there.
The Roman Army Museum I found disappointing (if you're in the area my recommendation would be to just spend a long time at Vindolanda; preferably on a nice day as it's an outdoor attraction).
Tuesday the weather in the North West was dreadful, but that wasn't a problem as we simply spent the morning window shopping in Keswick. Any thought of walking anywhere was soon discounted, given the wind-driven lashings of rain, and so in the early afternoon it was to home that we headed
Our sojourn there was short. This morning we were on the road again, this time to Wrexham where we enjoyed a tour of Erddig house and gardens. Unlike any other visitors, we had a personal tour guide and also got to see some areas that are closed to the public. An excellent excursion to a worth-visiting National Trust property.
From Wrexham we were on the road again, this time to Barmouth.
Why in the world people come on holiday here I do not know. How the eating establishments here survive is a further mystery given the general poor quality, often hideous-datedness and dearth of customers outside of August (there is only one decent place in town and that was booked out). But we are only here for one night and with particular business to attend to. By 10am we will be on our way again.
For the first time in my history with Barmouth (I lived here for a while and thanks to a (now ex-) family property have always had a bed available to me) we are camping. The campsite isn't too shoddy and we do have sea views, albeit at the expense of a level pitch.
And purely because she hadn't enjoyed an outing in the 10 months that we've had her, Dora (our Aztec Dura) is having her first trial. She's overkill for the conditions and we thought we would never be done pegging out all of those guys, but she's very spacious and I'm sure that if we were caught by a freak storm she would cope admirably.
Tomorrow's agenda (after a trip up a hillside with a bunch of beheaded flowers) is to visit either Chirk Castle or Powis Castle. Chirk will likely win purely for the reasons that we camped within sight of it on our Big Walk last year and met a chap at the Oykel Bridge Hotel who knew it well. What better reasons for a visit could one have?
Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange
What I didn’t mention was that I set out on the Chase on Friday with something of a sore head.
Thursday night had seen a celebration.
Perhaps not everyone celebrates pending unemployment like it’s a Good Thing, but I saw the fact that Mick had resigned from his job last week (which was only supposed to be for six months from last November in any case) as a cause for opening something bubbly.
So, by Christmas at least one of us will be unemployed and will have the time again to regain some of the lost fitness and enjoy proper amounts of fresh air and exercise.
“You’re going in this weather?” Mick asked me incredulously as I bade him farewell on Friday morning to take myself for a bit of a leg-stretch on The Chase.
“It’ll have stopped by the time I get there” I said doubtfully, looking out at the dark sky and lashing rain.
“You’re mad!” said Mick.
I thanked him for the vote of confidence (I put it down to jealousy; I’m sure that if he didn’t have to work he would have happily come along with me) and dashed along the drive to the car.
Twenty minutes later I pulled up in the usual car park on The Chase and got quite damp around the edges as I conceded that waterproofs were going to be required.
It seemed that most people had been put off by the weather, as I can’t have seen more than a dozen people in the 8.5 miles that I covered, and half of those were from a distance. As it went the weather wasn’t as bad as it had threatened to be. The rain did eventually give way to showers and having learnt my lesson the week before I took to sheltering under trees rather than taking the trouble to don waterproofs only to need to take them off ten minutes later.
Everything was very green and lush, except where it was the startling purple of heather in flower, and except in the vicinity of this sign which I particularly liked for its being so precise about what was being cut:
The 8.5 mile route was the usual one. I walked it anti-clockwise, because I always do. The only times it sees me in a clockwise direction is when I’ve just walked it clockwise, am after a 17-mile brain-in-neutral training walk, and can’t face walking it the same way twice in one day.
I’ve been following Richard’s progress southbound from John O’Groats since he set out in July and knowing that he would be passing close to us got in touch with him (via his support team back home in New Zealand) to arrange to meet up.
Having met him for the first time over a pint and some dinner on Thursday night, I was standing at his rapidly collapsing front door (he was just taking his tent down as I arrived) bright and early on Friday morning and ten minutes later we were outpacing the midges (midges on the Chase? That’s a first to me – I reckon Richard could be right when he says that they’re following him!).
Richard declared that he was having an easy navigation day as he had a local guide with him and perhaps I should have forewarned him that I haven’t got a particularly good record at accurate navigation when I’m busy chatting. He soon got the picture when just a few miles through the day we merrily walked down the wrong track (thank goodness (a) for the pylons and (b) that I noticed that we shouldn’t be walking towards pylons, or we could have gone seriously awry!). We shunned backtracking though and simply re-routed slightly with no extra distance caused.
The start and end points of the day dictated that much of the walking was on roads, so Richard got a tour not only of little lanes but also a few housing estates where I thought they looked like they would offer a better route to where we were going. Only a few hundred yards along the A5 towards Cannock (where the traffic was stationary thanks to the V Festival) were unpleasant and we wouldn’t have even been on such a major road if it hadn’t been for the complete impassability of the right of way that we should have been taking.
The forecast had been for heavy showers so we counted ourselves lucky to have fine skies for the first half of the morning. Then a few spots of rain were felt and we grasped at the straw that we were just getting the edge of a shower. Five minutes later waterproofs were donned. Ten minutes later the sun was beating down on us and off the waterproofs had to come. It became a bit of a theme for the day.
The heaviest downpour of the day cruelly hit us just five minutes before we reached the pub at Essington, which we had earmarked for a break, it was then sunny for the whole time we were inside and promptly started raining again as we left. Harrumph!
Roads and footpaths took us to a canal towpath, which would not only lead us to Wolverhampton but would bypass the dodgy areas that Richard had plotted on his map. Right into the city we did not go though, as Richard’s route had him finishing the day to the south of the city and taking a detour to see the sights of the centre didn’t seem a priority to add to a 18 mile day.
I managed to pay enough attention to our whereabouts (whilst we put the world to rights on the subject of gas and electrical regulations) to find the right bridge to take us off the canal so that we could pick Richard’s intended route back up and fifteen minutes later we were done for the day having covered 18 miles.
With the V Festival traffic thwarting Mick’s plans to drive over to pick us up, the local public transport was sampled (oh the joys of ‘exact fare only’ buses when you’ve intentionally spent all of your loose change so as to save weight!) as a bus was caught into the city centre and thence a train back to Rugeley where we found Mick waiting to whiz us back to our house for the night.
It was an good day in excellent company only marred marginally by a few inconsiderately timed heavy showers and by the discovery that the poorly knee is still far from better.
Until a small handful of months ago I had not owned a ‘new fangled’ phone which did things like take pictures and send emails. My brief dalliance with a new blogging device (LG KS360) on the TGO challenge gave me a taster of what was possible and people seemed to like being able to see the occasional photo with a post, so I finally bit the bullet and bought the phone that I really wanted: a Blackberry.
I like the Blackberry a lot, and having a camera on it has been quite useful a number of times when I’ve found myself in an ‘I need a photo’ situation without a camera.
But … it is also partially to blame for this week’s continued failure to blog (how has it been three weeks already?).
On Monday I thought I’d put together a little write-up of last Friday’s walk with Richard, but before I did that I wanted to download a couple of photos that I had taken with the Blackberry.
Three nights later and I had lost twelve hours in my quest of getting the Blackberry to talk to the computer as a mass storage device. Having downloaded the drivers, the computer recognises the Blackberry, but the Blackberry refuses to act per its settings.
With twelve hours lost and much pulling out of my hair (a tenuously related side effect of which was that I finally got around to upgrading the RAM in the laptop from 512Mb to 1Gb; if I’d realised that it was such a cheap 30 second job I would have done it a long time ago), I admitted defeat. Finding that I could buy a card reader for £2.60 may have helped in my defeat.
But I digress. It was that “but I want the photos” interlude that delayed my post about the walk with Richard.
The card reader is going to take a few days to arrive, but in the meantime I will finally rectify my tardiness by blogging about last Friday without the photos.
(A retrospective replacement for Sunday’s accidentally deleted post)
I did not have a good night’s sleep on the campsite in Llanidloes. For once, it was not any occupants of the campsite who kept me awake, but a do which was going on down in the village which involved music (albeit not bad music) being broadcast at quite some volume until midnight.
To add to my late night, I (very annoyingly) awoke very early and so when the alarm went off Mick may have justified in calling me grumpy.
The grumpiness didn’t last too long, and by the time we set out at 7.30 I had got all of the whinging out of my system and was ready to enjoy the day.
It was a day of three parts. The first part was across farmland and was characterised by route-finding challenges (not too hot on footpath maintenance around these parts, it would seem) and challenging terrain. The exceedingly narrow path, completely obscured by overgrown heather, on the edge of a very-steep-almost-vertical drop was particularly interesting. A veritable adventure in fact.
Shortly after nearly adopting three friendly dogs which seemed intent on walking the whole of rest of the way with us (they were finally thwarted by us scurrying through a gate), the second section of the day began. Thankfully short, at under an hour in length, it was on tarmac, but after the slow progress during the earlier route finding difficulties it made for fast transit to our lunch venue.
Hafren Forest picnic site would have been an ideal location for lunch had it not been for the man on the sit-on mower who was intent on cutting very single blade of grass on the field notwithstanding that most of the tables were occupied. We staunchly refused to move until he got so close that our toes were in danger.
Mowing the grass at a popular picnic area at lunchtime on a sunny Sunday? Surely there are more appropriate times?!
After a goodly lunch break, into the forest we headed on good tracks and on exiting its top edge the third section of the day began – on open hillside, which presented far fewer navigational challenges than the precision required for walking through farmland.
It was an arduous yomp through tussocks, bog and huge quantities of long grass up the side of Pumlumon, but I quite like a good yomp, and by-and-by the ridge was reached, and from there the going was easier up to the top of Pumlumon.
By the time we got to the top the earlier clear skies were gone and the clouds were ominously grey.
The plan had been to find a pitch somewhere above the track which leads down to the road around Nant-y-Moch reservoir, but nothing promising presented itself. After a bit of a recce along the first bit of the track, it was as the first drops of rain began to fall that we selected the best of what presented itself and tents were pitched. Mick and I chose grass-topped shale on one side of the track, whilst Martin chose deep grass on the other side.
The rain was expected to be persistent, but it turned out to be just one of a number of very light showers that passed by during the night, and by an hour later we were sitting outside of the tent eating our tea in the sunshine – and in turn being eaten by the local midge population.
Although only around 15 or 16 miles in length, it had felt like a hard day to me, and after typing a lengthy blog post (which I later accidentally deleted), I wasted no time in settling down into my sleeping bag. By 8.30pm snoring was to be heard.
A definite contender for the ‘best birthday card ever received’ award
After card opening (the one shown above did make me laugh!), a major navigation exercise was mounted when I decided that a shopping trip was what I wanted to do with the day and we headed over to Nottingham. We’ve been there before, but seem to have suffered amnesia as to the layout of the city centre and thus spent three hours walking miles and miles, trying to fathom the locations of the outdoor shops. A map from the Information Centre assisted us a little in finding two, but after three hours Cotswold was still being elusive and I had bought nothing.
GPS technology seemed like the way to go, so returning to the car we employed the Sat-Nav to find Cotswold, and finally I parted with some money; rather more than intended actually.
Being on a roll by then, a browse of Decathlon seemed like a good idea as we were so close. As always, we happily whiled away over an hour browsing, but bought nothing more interesting than underwear.
The day turned out to be just as exhausting as walking across Wales, but I returned home just as happy with my frivolous purchases as those which were intended.
It was a 7.15 start this morning after an excellent, blissfully quiet, night's sleep. A bit of light rain had fallen in the night, and briefly as we breakfasted, but it was dry by the time we were all assembled and so, unexpectedly, waterproof trousers were left in our packs.
Multiple groups of 'roadside campers' were passed as we walked part of the way around Nant y Moch Reservoir before striking off along a By-way and onwards along the side of Llyn Craigypistyll.
At the dam end of the llyn two route choices presented themselves and a democratic decision was made to avoid the scree slopes on the north side of the valley. Viewing those slopes later from opposite the north-side they didn't look too bad and if walking the route again I would take that side of the valley.
A path through a forest and a footbridge took us to a track which gave us good, fast walking all the way down to Bont-goch. In fact the whole morning was fast, with easy route finding and easy walking on trodden paths and tracks.
Lanes, one of them (from where red kites were seen) particularly nice being more like a track than a road, took us to the main road into Aber, but of course a main road was not what we wanted.
We managed to find a surprising number of hills to walk up on those last few kilometres which was cruel as my mind was most decidedly in the mode of 'it's all downhill to the sea'.
Despite taking a bit of a circuitous route on the edge of Aber thanks to being faced with a plethora of paths in some woodland, we did finally make it.
As the previous post showed, toes (admittedly still enclosed in their footwear) were dipped in the sea and the trip was over.
Incredibly, considering that the forecast was for much rain on both Saturday and today, we were only actually rained on for the first couple of hours after we set out. The very edge of a few other showers caught us but nothing to warrant waterproofs. We have Martin to thank for that, for it is he who has the superb record for backpacking weather.
Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange
