Wednesday 26 January - Jaén and La Guardia de Jaén (via Puerto Lápice)

Where's Bertie? He's at a free Aire at La Guardia de Jaén. Exact location: 37.74240, -3.69644.
Weather: Mainly sunny but with a few cloudy spells and a couple of short, light showers. Temperature between -2 and 15 degrees.

We need more hours in the day. Or to drive less. Fortunately, having made it sufficiently far south in Spain to say that we've finished travelling and are now touring, tomorrow we should be able to find time to do more (and for me not to be trying to type a blog post when I should be washing dishes, perilously close to bedtime).

The lack of hours in the day meant that we ran out of time last night to even think about our destination for today. Given that was critical information to inform the direction in which we left Burgos, I figured that once I got back from my run this morning I would come up with some options whilst Mick (who's run was to be twice as long as mine) was still out.

That plan went out the window when we woke to ice on the inside of the double-glazed window above the bed, leading Mick to come over all nesh and declare that he wasn't going to run until later. I can't blame him. If we wanted to exercise in that temperature, we could have stayed at home.

I sprang into action, preparing breakfast, boiling a couple of litres of water for later in the day, whilst at the same time consulting the road atlas and weather forecasts. I soon had a plan and by 0815 we were headed south out of Burgos. Rather a wasted visit, and we can't even claim to have had a peaceful night, thanks to 'Mr Shouty Man' at 3am.

Our initial objective was Puerto Lápice, where we stopped at the deserted Aire (at the end of a residential street, but with a reasonable view up to a couple of windmills) to use the service point and for a quick bit of lunch. We had the option of staying there for the night, but Mick's vote was to continue on the extra couple of hours to Jaén, where, rather than running along roads, we could use a Via Verde (ex-railway leisure route)*.

It was around a quarter past four when we arrived there so we wasted as little time as possible in finding somewhere to park, getting ourselves changed and out the door. The temperature at that time was 15 degrees, but there was a keen breeze blowing, making it feel cooler.

Along the Via Verde del Aceite (Greenway of the Oil - it runs through olive plantations) we went, although only for a tiny fraction of its 128km length.

I don't think I've mentioned yet (and it's possible not common knowledge outside of Spain) that face coverings are currently mandatory even outside in Spain. There are only two exceptions: 1) you're taking park in individual exercise (such as running or cycling) on your own; or 2) you're in a natural environment, such as a forest. In both cases, in order for the exemption to apply, you must be able to maintain a social distance of 1.5m from others.

The Via Verde was busy with walkers, runners and cyclists. Of the walkers, it was probably a 50/50 split between those wearing a mask and those not. Those running were 99% mask-free. We assume that two people from the same household are able to exercise together mask-free, so whilst Mick and I did carry our face coverings, just in case, we didn't wear them.

I took this just before we started running, intending to take a more illustrative photo later, but I completely forgot.

Once back at Bertie I set about deciding where we were going to spend the night. Our intention had been to stay in Jaén, but then I found that although we were only 1km, as the crow flies, from one of the overnight options, it was going to take us 14 minutes to get there, needing to either go right around the houses, or to tackle city roads that Google was reporting as being slow. There was another option 7km away that would take the same time to reach. Then I looked a little further afield and found that there's an official Aire here in La Guardia de Jaén - a 22km drive, but only 17 minutes. The only danger, given that it was already 1800, was that the Aire would be full, and there was no other obvious option nearby, but given how few motorhomes we've seen (even the Burgos Aire was only half full last night), we thought that the risk was low.

We were right. For the third night out of four so far, Bertie is all by himself.

I was ready to eat a scabby dog, and the light was fast draining out of the sky, by the time we got here, so although we saw on the drive in that we're parked next to a castle, we've not explored in any way. Being in no rush to go anywhere tomorrow, we will be at leisure to have a look around then.

(*A few weeks ago I was searching for information about Voies Vertes in France, but I confused my languages and came up with a map of all Vias Verdes in Spain. I've since imported it into Google Maps - which is how I came to identify Jaén as a good running location for today.)

Tuesday 25 January - Burgos, Spain

Where's Bertie? He's at a free Aire in the city of Burgos (exact location: 42.35513, -3.67395)
Weather: Clear skies all day. The highest temperature we saw on Bertie's thermometer as we drove was 18 degrees, but we were heading south into the sun, so I suspect the reality was a little less.

I remembered to set Bertie's heating to come on at seven o'clock this morning - a bonus on another cold and frosty morning. 

A light breakfast and we were soon off, but our first driving stint of the day was short - just 3km! - taking us to the 'Site des Dougnes' - the location of a parkrun that we've attended a few times. We were a couple of days late (or five days early) for the parkrun, but as we know the place it was an easy choice for a bit of exercise. Indeed, it was the reason we chose Cubnezais as yesterday's end point.

A gorgeous start to the day as again the sun rose over hoary grass

Taken with the sun behind me on my final (of 3) laps

Mick's run was longer than mine, giving me time to get us prepared for the day (mainly boiling water for our travel mugs and for a flask to save time when we stopped for lunch) before we sat down for a late breakfast. It was 10am by the time we finally hit the road properly.

Except for our usual toll avoidance tactics at the first two toll plazas to the south of Bordeaux (leave at the junction before, rejoin at the junction after), we paid for motorways the whole way down to the Spanish border. The final bit of that journey, accompanied by hazy air through which hills like La Rhune were peeking, was a little nervous as Bertie's fuel light came on and his trip computer counted down the miles remaining alarmingly fast as Bertie heaved us up the hills. We held faith that he had enough to get us into Spain, and thus, even though we stopped at the motorway service station after the border, we paid €1.50/litre rather than €1.80 at French service stations (yesterday, off the motorway we paid €1.62/litre).

There were miles and miles of lorries queuing for the French border.

In my capacity as navigator, I pondered the options once we were in Spain and decided that rather than taking our usual route (free motorway-esque road) to Vitoria Gastiez, we would take the GI632, followed by the AP1. That was based on my belief (seemingly confirmed by a Google search) that the AP1 was now toll-free. It turns out that only the southern section of that road had its tolls removed, so for a saving of 8km + a chunk of ascent + about 10 minutes compared with our usual route, we had to fork out €6.71. Lesson learnt, and another note has been made in our road atlas. When we finally buy a more up-to-date map, I'm going to have my work cut out transferring all my notes and post-it notes to the new one!

The last hour of the day seemed to drag. A stint at the steering wheel would have helped, but I didn't want to leave Mick to navigate the final stretch of the day again*, and, by and by, the kilometres did tick on by until we arrived at 1730 (to a car park bustling with police; no idea what that was about). With the sun not even close to the horizon (sunset is 1820 here today), we headed out for a short stroll before tea.

Burgos may not have been the wisest choice of end point, in that the drive into the city was slow, and will no doubt be equally so on our way out tomorrow, but having been here before* we knew that there's a path along the river that will serve for tomorrow's running route. It's also the point at which we need to decide on where we're going in southern Spain (yep, we really have got this far with no clue as to where we're going) as that will decide whether we proceed from here down the west side of the country or through the middle, via Madrid.

Wherever we end up tomorrow, we're hoping for a warmer overnight temperature. It's forecast to be -4 here tonight! 

Whilst we are no longer allowed to carry dairy products into the EU, I couldn't see any restriction on cakes, so I used up our butter with lots of baking last weekend, including the best chocolate cakes I have ever made (now all gone, alas). They made up for the coffee ones, which I under-coffeed. 

^{(*Our navigation method on this trip is the usual TomTom SatNav with all its little foibles that cause us not to trust it (although it's still better than our Garmin SatNav), together with the usual paper atlas, but this time we're also using Google Maps to shout instructions via Bertie's speakers. Google has many benefits over either of our dedicated SatNavs, and gives far clearer instructions, but Mick's not particulary familiar with the App (and is unlikely to become so if I continue to only drive the navigationally easy sections!), so finds the navigational task far more stressful than driving.
**Our previous visit was six years ago, when we visited the city and took a tour of the cathedral; my abiding memory is that I got so cold during our tour that as we walked back to our campsite at the end of the day I felt like I would never be warm again.)}

Monday 24 January - Cubnezais

Where's Bertie? He's in a car park in Cubnezais (N of Bordeaux). He previously spent nights here in January 2020 and in March 2019.
Weather: Gloriously sunny start and end to the day, but with around 3 hours of fog in the middle. Morning temperature: 1-4 degrees; afternoon: up to 14 degrees.

We were already driving down the A154 this morning by the time the big golden orb of the sun rose over the hoary fields. It had been a cold night, and the field adjacent to which we were parked looked pretty in the pre-dawn light, but I was quite happy to view it from inside rather than venturing out. It was thus Mick's job this morning to nip across the road to the Epicerie to pick up a couple of pastries for elevenses. 

With our target for the day being such a long way in front of us, we were hoping for a smooth day. I scuppered that hope quite early on, by setting a 'travel via' waypoint of a supermarket in the town of Dreux. I didn't need to set that waypoint, as we were going to be driving right by the store, but it would mean that we didn't sail on past.

Unfortunately, as I now know, I selected the Lidl on the wrong side of Dreux, not on our route at all, and because I wasn't paying a great deal of attention, I didn't notice until a few hundred metres too late. Attempts to turn around had us driving tiny residential streets, finding many dead-ends that Google thought were through routes, and it must have been a good twenty minutes until we were finally back to where we needed to be, only then to find that the car park was guarded by a 2m height barrier (we found a road around the back where we could park and I went on foot). Add that to the stop to buy fuel, where the machine kept telling us it couldn't accept our credit card, then finally decided it could, only for me to misremember the relevant PIN. All delays we could have done without!

Things didn't improve when, a while later, we both failed to notice that the speed limit had dropped to 70 (the usual speed limit on a single-carriageway road is 80, but on a criteria that we've not yet worked out, that often (but not always) drops to 70 when passing a junction). The first we knew was when a speed camera flashed just a few metres before the 'end of 70' sign. A glance at the SatNav told us we were doing 79.

Darn it! If we were going to be paying a speeding fine, then we may as well have taken the toll roads, have saved at least an hour off our day, not to mentional all the faff of constantly changing speed limits, traffic lights, and roundabouts.

The mood lifted a short while later when a quick Google search told me that since Brexit the reciprocal agreement between DVLA and France has ended. We got flashed again later in the day, but on that occasion we weren't speeding (on roads with various speed limits for different types of vehicle, motorhomes tend to get flashed because the cameras see them as being big and assume they're subject to the lower limit, only later in the processing to decide that they were actually legal).

After a tedious morning of slow roads, just before Tours we took to the toll road and, contrary to the usual tactic of using only short sections to bypass the worst bits of the slow roads, today we stayed on it all the way to Poitiers. Just under twenty euros was the damage, but it saved us about an hour (and a lot of tedium).

From there the N10 is effectively a free motorway, except that it doesn't have any service/rest areas, instead directing traffic to nearby towns for any services they need. We did detour via one village, just to empty Bertie's toilet, at which point we switched driving duties. I would have liked to have swapped back before the end of the day, but equally didn't want to waste time by leaving the motorway to find somewhere to pull over. That left me at the wheel and put Mick on navigational duties for the fiddly last few kilometres of the day. He would much rather have been driving (because he doesn't like navigating, not (I hope!) because my driving is frightful).

The sun was sinking rapidly by the time we pulled into the car park in Cubnezais, so we wasted no time in nipping out for a quick leg-stretch around the village, getting back to Bertie just as the sun dipped out of sight.

Bertie, all on his lonesome in the car park, just as the sun went down. With a forecast negative overnight temperature, we've deployed the external blinds tonight.  

An interrogation of atlases and apps this evening has suggested a destination for tomorrow and, yes, it will be in Spain.

Sunday 23 January - Surville, France

Where's Bertie? He's in a car park in the village of Surville, not far south of Rouen (exact location: 49.19869, 1.10171).
Weather: Dry but overcast. Whilst driving: max 8 degrees, min 4 degrees.

Our alarms were set for a time probably not chosen by many households in the UK on a Sunday morning and an hour and a half later Bertie headed out into the dark, fuelled by the excitement of his first long trip since he rushed us home in the middle of March 2020.

I was also being kept alert by excitement, rather than by a sufficiency of sleep. Two significant things have occurred since we last crossed the Channel to France: 1) Brexit has come into effect (more on which later); and 2) Covid has created extra border requirements.

The latter issue had been the thief of sleep, as within 24 hours of travel we needed to take a Covid test, then to load three documents (Covid result certificate; Sworn Health Declaration; and Covid Vaccination Pass) onto the Eurotunnel website for approval pre-travel, with the warning that if we didn't do that, then we would be subject to delays upon arrival at the Eurotunnel terminal. Goodness, what a trial of a succession of technical issues! I got there in the end, but far later into the night than I would have chosen.

Why so late? Well: 1) as the Covid Test* had to be taken within 24 hours of travel, we decided to hedge against delays by taking it late on Saturday night; and 2) we'd post-dated our Health Declarations for the date of travel, and given the nature of the document it seemed ill-advised to upload it too far in advance.

It turned out that it was worth the pain of getting those documents uploaded, as we sailed through Check-in and Border Control (once we finally reached the front of the queue for each!) whereas those in front of us were spending an age at each, handing over various pieces of paper that weren't requested from us.

Whilst each wait seemed interminable at the time, we were clearly just being impatient, as we were on a moving shuttle less than an hour after we pulled off the M20, and two hours before our booked crossing**. The earlier arrival in France was a massive bonus as (of course) it gave us two more hours of daylight to travel south, and the further we could get on a Sunday (very little traffic; no lorries) the better. As it turned out we had more daylight than we needed, arriving in Surville at around 1730.

It had been a long old day for Bertie who, in the UK, only had a brief stop for fuel and a few pauses in various queues at Eurotunnel. Then, after his rest on the train, he sped us south through France with just a couple of micro-pauses for a change of driver.

It had, of course, been a long day for us too, but I still managed to take myself out into the bitter cold on arrival for a power-walk around the village. Then it was back to Bertie to try to concoct something for tea. This is where the significance of Brexit came into play, as we are now not permitted to carry a whole list of foodstuffs into Europe. Our fridge was thus somewhat bare, and shops in France aren't open on a Sunday. What I thought at the point of preparation was probably the worst excuse for a meal I'd ever served to Mick, actually turned out to be perfectly acceptable.

Our continuing mission is to get to the south of Spain as fast as we reasonably can, so let's see where we get to tomorrow.

The church in Surville

Bertie's home for the night

^{(*What a nonsense the pre-travel Covid test is! We each took a lateral flow test at home, uploaded a photo of the result to the company that we'd bought them from, and received our travel certificates back within 30 seconds. That company had no knowledge as to whether the swabs had been near any nostrils, whether ours or anyone else's.
**In the few days between me first looking at Eurotunnel prices and being able to book, the prices rocketed - unsurprising in retrospect as lots of people had probably spent the previous month desperate to travel to France. We'd wanted to travel on Saturday, but the earliest reasonably priced crossing available was at 1420 on Sunday. We thus employed our usual strategy of arriving early and hoping to be offered an earlier crossing at no extra charge. It's a strategy that's only ever failed once, at the end of August one year when the Chunnel was the busiest I've ever seen it.)}

The end of 2021

Where's Bertie? By way of a sneak peek of what is to come, I'll tell you that Bertie has spent 10 hours of today travelling south and is currently sitting in a car park in the village of Surville, France.

Before I launch into daily blogs about the trip upon which we have today embarked, I thought I'd first nip back to the final 3 months of 2021 and summarise them in five memorable (not all in a good way) occurrences:

1) At the end of October, whilst running at a parkrun, I found a pothole, hidden under flood water, with my left foot. A not insignificant amount of damage was done to the soft tissue that sits over the cuboid bone and as a result not a single step did I run in November. In December I started tentatively throwing some short running intervals into my walks (a week after doing the damage, I could walk again, but only forwards and on flat tarmac; anything else was yelp-inducing). It's still not completely better, but it's now two weeks since I last yelped due to an unfortunate foot placement.

2) If there was a good time to do a run-stopping injury to myself, then the end of October was probably as good as it got, as we spent November all-consumed by refurbishing a rental property. The memorable moment came five days into the work, when I said "I'll just stick my head up into the loft to make sure it's clear.". That's when I found the previous tenant had constructed a cannabis farm up there, taking up half of the area. Its removal proved educational for someone as naive of such matters as I am.

A small snapshot of the inside of the structure. We're not sure if the mess was created during the police raid or by the tenant, but all the pots had been upended and the floor of the structure was inches deep in compost. There were no plants remaining, but my goodness, the few leaves in amongst the compost were pungent!

3) Just as the refurbishment was coming to a close and we thought we might manage a short trip to Wales, along came Storm Arwen, which brought down a huge conifer at another rental property. Of all the directions it could have fallen, it fortuitously fell the most convenient way so as to minimise damage and danger, but on its way it destabilised the adjacent tree that then became liable to fall into the building next door. It was an expensive do getting that sorted (and 'sorted' transpired to be having 7 large conifers and 1 deciduous species that I can't now name removed), following which the garden was left exposed to the parkland behind. Ideally I would have employed a fencing team to sort that out but finances dictated otherwise. Fence panels weren't an option for a couple of reasons, but I think Mick and I did a pretty decent job of constructing a feather-edge fence, even if it did take us two full days to achieve.

4) Trees continued to be a theme in December, when we decided it was time for our apple tree to come down (I like having an apple tree, but this one is far too big for the space it's in and only produces fruit about once every three years). On the first day of the task, during which I was the one up the tree, I questioned whether I'm getting a bit old to be climbing trees. Apparently not, as the following day Mick took his turn. Working on the basis of tackling a minimum of two branches every day (getting them down and processing for disposal; most days we did more than 2), it took us around 10 days of work to get it into the state in which we have currently left it.

During and after. A tree surgeon could likely have achieved this in a morning. Disposing of the waste is nearly complete, but ongoing.

5) Mick started training for the Seville Marathon, and we were all geared up to head to Spain at the beginning of January, to get acclimatised to the heat in good time for the event. Then France decided that we dirty Brits* were a danger to the health of their nation, and banned us from entering. All ferries to Spain were booked solid until the end of March. Would we get the trip that we've been so longing for, or were we going to be thwarted again? (The answer to this question is of course obvious, given the spoiler I gave right at the beginning of this post.)

(*For my future reference: As the Omicron variant of Covid19 swept through the UK, France implemented border restrictions such that Brits could only enter the country from the UK for a limited number of essential purposes. Omicron soon swept through France too, with even higher case numbers than the UK was seeing, yet the restrictions remained in place until 14 January.)

Friday - Monday 8-11 October

Where was Bertie? Fri: the end of a dead-end road outside of Queen's Park in Glasgow. Sat: Ma-in-Law's driveway, Halifax. Sun: Home! Mon (Daytime): Dave Newell Leisure Vehicle Services, Madeley.

Weather: Fri: rain. Sat: Rain (but 15 degrees). Sun: Glorious sunshine. Mon: lightly overcast but dry.

Waking up in the supermarket car park in Perth on Friday morning, Mick asked how I'd slept. Pretty well, was the answer, with just a few minor disturbances. The nearby road was noisy, but not such that it kept me awake or woke me. 

"There was a HGV that pulled in in the middle of the night." said Mick. I had a little think and did vaguely recall its arrival. A few moments later Mick opened one of the blinds and said "I wonder where it parked. I'm not sure I can see it." This was the view from that window:

Looking out of the window in Bertie's door. That's the side of the lorry parked a couple of feet away. 

Once I'd extracted myself from under the duvet I nipped out to see how many lorries were parked up, in contravention of the prominent and plentiful 'No HGV Parking; £70 fine' signs (the only restrictions displayed in the whole, vast car park). It turned out there were only two vehicles in the entire section of the car park where we'd put Bertie: us and the HGV an arm's length away from us.

I'd like to report that once we were up we went and did something cultural, as I suggested we might. Alas, the weather was miserable and neither of us could be moved to walk the 20 minutes into the city in those conditions. The furthest we went was into the shop to buy a few things. Otherwise, we sat around a lot until, just after lunch, it felt like an appropriate time for the next leg of our journey. 

I'd checked out my intended parking location in Glasgow on StreetView and was confident that we wouldn't have trouble finding a Bertie-sized space. That we did, but what you can't easily see on StreetView is whether a road is on a slope. There was one spot that was reasonably level, but I felt that we would have stuck out a bit too prominently parking there overnight, so we slept on a double-aspect slope (tail and left hand down) in a more discreet position further back down the road. 

Saturday

The bonus of parking outside of Queen's Park was that, for the third consecutive week, we were able to roll out of bed and arrive at a parkrun start line. The downside of parking outside a city park on a weekend (even though we were near the end of a dead-end) is that it wasn't as quiet a night as we would have preferred. We've had far worse nights though, and once again the convenience of the location made the disturbances worthwhile. 

Fortunately, we'd recce'd the parkrun course on Friday afternoon, once the weather had dried and brightened (it was raining and dull on Saturday morning), so we got to see the view from the highest point in Glasgow, which lies within the park.

Taken in Fridays reasonably clear weather. The views were severely curtailed on Saturday. 

The parkrun course runs past that high point, and as it's a 3-lapper, it does so 3 times. It's a couple of years since I last did a parkrun with that much ascent (Kräherwald and Seewoog, both in Germany are comparable with over 100m of ascent), and I was a lot slower this week than I was back then. It was still good fun, though - particularly the last 500m during which all the height is lost for the final time. 

There's not much to say about the rest of the day, other than that it involved a lot of driving, and that we arrived at Ma-in-Law's in good time for showers (not sure why I'd completely failed to shower after any of my exertions over the previous 4 days!) before the Thai meal we'd ordered whilst driving down the M74, was delivered. 

As we headed out to Bertie in the dark on Saturday night (because it's easier to sleep in Bertie on Ma-in-Law's drive than it is to take in everything we need for an overnight stay) Mick tripped over this chap. (S)he'd gone by Sunday morning so hopefully wasn't injured by the accidental contact. 

Sunday

With Bertie booked in for an engine service on Monday, we were torn as to whether to go straight there, or  to go via home. Even though it involved more time and distance, we opted for the latter. The weather was such that, having arrived home at 1330, I had a load of washing out on the line by 1430 and it was dry two hours later. During those two hours I did something exceedingly uncommon: I gave Bertie's interior a thorough spring clean. It's not that I never clean him, it's just that I seldom clean everything all in one go. I was impressed at the end of it that: 1) it can take that long to clean a space that small; and 2) how good he looked!

Monday

With Bertie dropped off for his service (some 21 months after his last, but he did spend 12 months of that off the road), we had an unknown length of time, but not less than 3 hours, to kill in Madeley. Fortunately, there's a chain pub just up the road from the garage, and I've always found chain establishments to be quite tolerant of extended periods of loitering. Moreover, it was lunchtime, and I'd not made us a packed lunch because I knew we needed to kill time somewhere and lunch seemed like a good place to start. 

"We're not serving food. We've got a gas leak." was the message we got whilst we were still crossing the pub's car park. This was not ideal!

A bit of tapping on my phone, and a 10 minute walk into town, followed by a good few minutes searching for the cafe that Google Maps told us should have been right in front of us, and we found ourselves in a little independent cafe. It turned out that they were pretty tolerant of their customers loitering for extended periods too (not just us; a group of regular customers were doing likewise albeit probably not for the same reason)...

Healthy eating. Forgot to take a snap of the slabs of cake with which we followed this.

...Even so, after 2 hours, we felt like maybe we were in danger of outstaying our welcome.

After three and a half hours, spread across two establishments, and entertained by four crosswords, the phone call came that Bertie was ready.

As for the leaking fuel tank that we'd asked them to look at, all that was done today was to confirm that it is leaking from somewhere on the top (yep, we already knew that!) and will need to be dropped to see what the problem is (yep, we knew that too). Seems that we'll need to book it in again for that to be done. In the meantime, we'll stick with only filling the tank 3/4 full.     

 

Wed & Thurs 6-7 October - Loch Kinardochy and Perth

Where was Bertie? Wed: a second night overlooking Loch Kinardochy. Thurs: a supermarket car park in Perth (because we are, after all, living the dream...) 
Weather: Wed: sunny and calm with a rising temperature; Thurs: wet and low cloud but calm and warm.

Wednesday
I think it was in June this year, some four and a bit years after we bought Bertie, that I thought to investigate the timing function on his heating system. I now wonder why we never used it before, and I've had it permanently set on this trip to put the heating on 15 minutes before we're due to get up. Even though it only takes a few seconds to hop out of bed and turn it on, it's so much nicer to have the space already warm before emerging from the duvet.

This morning the chill was well and truly gone by the time my alarm sounded at 0630, but I still struggled to spring out of bed, perhaps because it was still dark out. We didn't lounge around too long, though, and at 0650 we pulled into the car park at the start of the path up Schiehallion (I've described the walk itself on t'other blog, that you'll find by Clicking here).

With the weather so fine, after lunch I headed off up another hill and, per standard practice, I sent Mick a message to let him know I'd reached the top...

...His response was that he was just watching a motorcyclist being loaded into an ambulance.

I was picturing a horrific road traffic accident, and finding Mick in need of sweet tea, but the reality was less dramatic. A group of five bikers (two of whom were aged 68 and 80; the rest were likely in a similar bracket) had pulled into the car park. After the obligatory photos (a lot of people pull into that car park, take a couple of photos, read the sign about the lime kiln, then leave again), they'd remounted their machines and started pulling out of the car park. All should have been well, but as one of them turned his bike around to leave, his back wheel slid on the grit surface and down he went.

Mick naturally offered any assistance he could give, but they'd already called an ambulance and there wasn't anything else they needed, other than for Mick to keep an eye on the injured (broken hip being the presumption) chap's bike whilst two of them rode over to Montrose to drop off their own bikes and return in a car.

By comparison, I had a completely uneventful afternoon.

After a day of excellent weather, the rain that was forecast to come in at 2100 arrived an hour early. It mattered not to us. We settled down to watch a bit of downloaded TV and, in my case, to cast on the socks I'm supposed to be knitting for someone. I pulled out the yarn, weighed it to check I had enough, checked how many stitches I need to cast on, then dug out my case of knitting needles. Inside I found the appropriate packet for the set I needed ...but it was empty. Darn it! I so nearly brought with me the fingerless gloves I started knitting in the spring, that got semi-abandoned when I realised I'd knitted seven eighths of the first one on the wrong size of needles. I will eventually pull that glove back, but in the mean time it's sitting at home on the wrong sized needles, and that's the size I need. At least I've got plenty of yarn with me to continue with the blanket I'm making instead.

Thursday
Mick got up first and reported that the cloud was so low that he couldn't even see the far side of the road. With a light rain falling, and the knowledge that I was going up another hill this morning, this didn't instill a sense of joy in me!

Although I got considerably wet on my hill (whilst also sweating cobs, because the temperature had risen remarkably since yesterday morning), it wasn't a bad little outing, and I was up and down it in only a few seconds over an hour.

Not knowing where we were going next, we procrastinated on making a decision by having a substantial elevenses (or maybe early lunch) and coffee, and when we did finally pull out of the 'community land' car park just before noon, it was to Perth we headed.

Stopping at Aldi on the edge of town, I first nipped into the Tiso outdoor store that sits in the same retail complex. There I nearly bought a pair of boots, and did buy a new merino wool top (one of my existing ones now has four patches on it and is threatening to hole in so many more places that I think that I have to declare it dead. Only had it 11 years too.)

With the weather being as it was (wet and miserable) we weren't going to be doing anything out of doors for the rest of the day, so a supermarket car park seemed as good a place as any for us to sit. Better, really, as even though we've positioned ourselves in a far corner, our wifi booster has been able to connect to the store wifi and, over the course of several hours, I've been able to download a couple of TV programmes I want to watch.

There's a possibility that if the weather perks up a bit in the morning we might go and do something cultural, as I'm now done with hills for this trip.