Monday 30 June - Otley

Where’s Bertie? He’s at a C&CC Temporary Holiday Site on the rugby practice pitches, just outside of Otley, where it costs 12 per night.

Weather: Sunny intervals and hot (29 degrees max)

I thought the car park in Otley looked to be a good one, and so it proved. A perfectly quiet night was had. I nipped over to the payment machine this morning and bought a ticket for four hours, giving us until 11.30 to have breakfast, go out for second breakfast and decide where to go today.

Breakfast was had in Bertie. Second breakfast was had in Wetherspoon’s, where the service was not up to the standard encountered elsewhere, and they seem to like to keep slices of fruit on their carpet…

Back at Bertie I spent what felt like an age looking for somewhere to go today. The big impediment is my current desire not to walk very far (the shin is no longer painful, and I have full movement back in my foot, but I can still feel it, and in the interests of it getting better as soon as possible* I want to rest it as much as possible). There are so many things I would like to do, but they almost all involve walking, and the things that don’t involve too much walking aren’t open on a Monday!

The ideal would thus be a parkup with a nice view, but without going too far out of our way. I scoured the maps, finding a dearth of options in the places that looked most appealing. In the end we opted to stay in Otley. With the Temp Holiday Site not opening until 2pm, we popped another couple of hours on Bertie’s ticket, then travelled the mile here via a prolonged stop at a very small Asda. We arrived at the site at 2.15, to find a curiously large number of units already fully set up, considering they’d only opened fifteen minutes earlier!

(As an aside: why didn’t we go to Halifax today, borrow the key from the Estate Agent, then continue down to the Peaks, as I’d mentioned yesterday? Because last night we messaged a friend in Halifax about meeting up today, but she didn’t see the message until this morning and assumed that when our message said ‘tomorrow’ we meant today’s tomorrow, not yesterday’s tomorrow. Wanting to see her, we decided to delay our visit until tomorrow.)

So, I type this from the middle of a rugby pitch, from where the view isn’t bad at all. We’ve done nothing since arriving, save for sitting outside, reading our books and trying not to burn or bake when the sun has emerged. It’s one of the very few occasions when we wish that Bertie had a sun canopy. That said, as I type this at 1715, the row of trees at the edge of the site is now providing some shade to our pitch.   

(*Despite statements during Lap 5 of my race last weekend, I have my eye on another 24-hour race later in the year.)