But it's the weekend and the sun is shining. I felt a huge urge to stand on top of a hill with the wind in my hair. Unfortunately 'stay local' when you live just near Gloucester doesn't leave much scope for that...
Sandhurst Hill stands a mighty 88m above sea level. But it is right next to the river and is actually fairly prominent, so you can easily pretend. A 7km route takes you around and over it.
nice view of the Severn floodplains doing their job, with the Malvern Hills in the background and actual river just visible in the foreground
We parked by the Red Lion pub and took the muddy path up the hill, turning right at a gate to continue around the hill on the Severn Way. You'd think this footpath junction would get a nice obvious Severn Way marker, but currently that is not the case. The path goes through some woods - muddy in places at the moment - then into fields following the river bank.
Turning away from the river onto Rodway Lane, the ascent begins! The rocky track/bridleway that goes all the way to the top of the hill is also quite fun to ride bikes down. Maybe not so much riding up, but a lot of people do enjoy that sort of thing...
Of course I insisted that Jon take a picture of me sitting on the trig point. We also put Tilly up there for photos, if you prefer some #trigpointdogs.
From the top it's pretty much a straight line back down the path to the Red Lion. Would have been lovely to pop in for a drink (or even dinner!) but noooo. That will have to wait a few more months. At least the walk helped my brain feel a bit refreshed.
]]>On this occasion, Plan A would have been another #GetOutsideDay activity challenge weekend with Zoe and Sarah. (See 2018, we also did 2019 but I suck at blogging so no write up of that one (yet?))
Plan B turned out to be a rather rainy walk in the Wye Valley, along the Angidy River in Tintern.
The Angidy Trail is a circular footpath exploring the hidden industry of the valley, which was used for making wire. The information claims that the walk is 5 miles, but when I plotted it out in OS maps it came up much shorter!
The trail starts from the Lower Wireworks car park (free), where there are some information boards about the history of wiremaking. The trail isn't specifically waymarked, and I'm not sure where the "5 Miles" claim comes from because it's definitely shorter - I'd plotted a route which included the trail and some extra hill and the whole lot came out at 7km (4.3 miles)
We took a wrong turning almost straight away - walking up the road rather than forking slightly left. With the help of a friendly local we eventually found the correct path though. The same man appeared again a little while later as we were admiring the remains of a dam and mill pool, and we had a good chat about the river, local history, and which famous people used to live nearby.
what's left of Abbey Tintern Furnace
I'm sure I've already mentioned that it was a particularly rainy day. The Angidy is only a small river, so it doesn't take much extra water to turn it into a bit of a raging torrent. Shortly after the furnace buildings, pictured above, we had to turn back on the flooded footpath and walk up the road instead.
Once we reached the top ponds at Pont y Saison we detoured from the Angidy Trail and headed up the hill to Fairoak. From here, it was back down through the sheltered woods until we got to Tintern. Another detour along the Wye Valley Walk took us to the limekilns.
And of course, you can't really go for a walk in Tintern without having a quick look at the Abbey. Mostly because it's massive and very obvious, hah.
The Wireworks bridge (frequently featured on Netflix's 'Sex Education') was our final point of interest, and very slippery.
Wireworks bridge selfie (pic by Zoe)
Soggy smiles all round! Rain aside, this was a lovely little walk. Some might argue that it would be even better on a dry day, followed by tea/cake/ice cream at the Abbey.
]]>This is so difficult to write. I've been coming back to it for a month now, going through all the photos we took of her and maybe adding a few more words before having to stop and cry some more. No amount of words or pictures will provide a fitting eulogy, but here we go:
Bonnie was rescued in Ireland, and made her way over here via the Dogs Trust. She had a couple of failed rehomings before eventually moving in with Jon about 8 years ago, and then I came on the scene a couple of years later.
I'd never lived with a dog before, and it did take some getting used to! Not going to lie, there was a bit of a power struggle at first as she was perhaps reluctant to share Jon's affections, but we soon figured it out.
impromptu modelling session
We don't know a lot about her early years, but can guess from her behaviour and reactions that she was most likely used for hunting - probably deer. Prey drive good, recall bad... And, unfortunately, she was a certified cat killer - so almost always wore a lovely pink muzzle when out and about, to keep both her and the local wildlife safe.
She loved walking, pubs, comfy sofas/beds/blankets, picking the fluff off tennis balls, pulling the stuffing out of toys, squeaking when she wasn't getting enough attention, and generally demanding treats and fuss. She did not like being bathed - but also wasn't one for rolling in stinky things so a bath was a very very rare thing.
Perimeter patrol at the dog field
Most of all she loved a good snuggle, and was happy to be used as a pillow (and vice versa). She was particularly good at being 'emotional support dog', providing affection if someone was sad or unwell.
love
When Tilly joined the family she loved having another dog to play with - and helped Tilly get over her separation anxiety as well as teach her a few bad habits.
She had started to slow down over the last year or so and definitely had a bit of arthritis creeping in, but maybe in hindsight we just didn't notice quite how old she was getting. She was probably somewhere between 12 and 14. Honestly, we were expecting (hoping for?) a slow dignified decline.
She'd had a lingering UTI, but bladder and kidney tests showed nothing else wrong. Maybe she'd been hiding other symptoms, but suddenly on a Saturday afternoon she presented with a lot of back pain. Vet's best guess was that the infection could have spread to her spine. Despite more antibiotics and painkillers, sadly she died on the Monday morning. One small solace is... continue reading »
]]>Bredon Hill is about half an hour away from Gloucester, and though I've cycled up it a couple of times I've never walked there.
Our route was taken from the Cicerone 'Walking in the Cotswolds' book, and clocked in at about 15km.
We all met up outside the church in Overbury (can go walking - can't share lifts. Sorry environment...) From here we walked to Kemerton, then ascended to the tower/viewpoint via well used footpaths. The weather was a little all over the place and we had a short soaking about half way up, but it seems the worst of the day's rain occurred when I was driving there so perhaps it was a good thing we went for afternoon walk instead of one with a lunch stop.
Malverns through barbed wire. A comment on lockdown, or me trying to be arty?
From the tower we walked along the ridge, following the Wychavon Way all the way down to Ashton. Interestingly this is marked differently on my paper OS map, as the route was modified in 2012.
As we walked back uphill from Ashton we spotted these two deer chilling out a couple of fields away. They wandered off as we got closer. We think we also may have seen a hare, and I'm reliably informed that the birds of prey we'd seen on the initial ascent were Red Kites.
Our last bit of uphill was through a field with a lot of sheep in it. I was a bit worried about how Tilly might react as obviously I didn't want her barking or trying to chase anything. She was on the lead at that point, of course, and I think actually she was a bit overwhelmed by the number of sheep so behaved herself very well.
Overall, a really nice walk - and a very welcome change of scenery and company.
]]>We'd booked a package deal to Austria with Skiworld, which got cancelled a few days before we were due to go because all the resorts shut. They told us we'd get a complete refund, so we (somewhat foolishly) instead booked a package to France with Crystal, as the resorts there were all insisting they'd still be open as there weren't any outbreaks in that region. I insisted on package deal because that meant ATOL protection should anything go wrong. Important!
Flew out to Chambery on a plane that was probably only half full. Got on a bus and arrived in Les Deux Alpes about an hour after the announcement that everything would be closing. D'oh.
They told us we'd be going home on Monday - initially the entire way by coach, but then that changed to a flight from Lyon. No-one seemed to know what time any flights would be, so we spent literally half the day sitting in (or outside) the airport waiting around until eventually boarding just before midnight. Phew.
Crystal promised they'd refund us in full, even though we'd 'used' the flights/transfers/three nights of hotel etc.
Our one day of "holiday" in a closed ski resort was a bit of weird one. We did a bit of panic buying at the supermarket, enjoyed a surprisingly nice lunch from the hotel restaurant (our package was full board), wandered around the town, and built a snowman. Oh, and drank wine.
what to do when there's snow but you can't ski?!
Six weeks later and Crystal have indeed refunded us, by the date they said they would.
Skiworld, on the other hand.... I'm not going to get into the full rant but it seems their customer service is somewhere between "non existent" and "awful".
They went from "you'll get a refund" to "you can have a voucher to book for next year" to "please claim on your travel insurance because it's not our problem". Originally they weren't even going to be refunding lift passes, but that bit at least has now happened (presumably because everyone went "er no, we know full well the resort have refunded you so give us our money back!!"). I've pretty much lost the will to live trying to deal with them, and we will NOT be booking with them again.
I work in the travel industry (or would if I wasn't furloughed) so I completely understand that this is a horribly difficult situation but there are definitely better ways of handling upset customers than radio silence and having all your email addresses bounce.
Oh well. Hopefully by next winter the world will be back to something resembling normal so ski holidays can happen again.
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