Probably the last bit of Wye Valley Walking for 2011 - Glasbury to Boughrood, and back again.
Mostly flat, walking through fields alongside the river, plus a little bit of road at Boughrood Brest.
When I reached Boughrood I stopped for lunch, then walked back to Glasbury along the road (the B4350). I'd hoped to cut a corner of that with a footpath, but what was visible on the map was not obvious in real life!
Did randomly discover a roadside bird hide though - looking across Pwllpatti nature reserve.
Rather than driving straight home once I had a little detour further upriver, for a quick 'bonus walk' around Llanstephan bridge. I'm hoping to complete the Erwood-Boughrood section of the Wye in my kayak in a few weeks time, but didn't want to miss out on exploring the bridge - which I think is the last wooden decked suspension bridge left in Wales, or something.
I also didn't want to miss out on getting my passport stamped at Trericket Mill. I now have all but one stamps - the missing one, of course, being the one from the source of the Wye.
In their infinite wisdom, facebook have decided to remove the ability to import notes from an RSS feed.
ie the feature I've been using for the past however long, to cross post my blog posts to facebook, so there's more chance of people actually reading them!
The only explanation given is for why you can no longer import to pages:
We want you to connect with your fans in the most effective ways possible. [...] The best way to get people to interact with your content is to give them insight into the links you share on your Wall by adding personal comments and responding to feedback from fans.
Which is probably all well and good if you're a business/celebrity/whatever and are using facebook to try and drum up business or otherwise raise your profile (side note: why?!). But I'm not - I have 'friends', not 'fans', and I thought the whole point of profiles vs pages is that they are for different purposes and thus work in different ways!
Conspiracy theories and general cynicism suggest it's because facebook want complete and full control over all your content, so therefore it must be better to force you to add it directly, where they can shower you with adverts. I suspect the new timeline and opengraph stuff may also have something to do with it.
I'd like to know why it's no longer ok for me to import blog posts, but it's fine (and, indeed, encouraged) for people to spam newsfeeds with what songs they've listened to on Spotify, or what articles they've just read on the Guardian/Independent/other online newspaper. Thank fuck for the 'hide' option!
Semi-related, but this has also finally given me the kick needed to play with the Twitter API so I can auto-tweet blog posts. Which took far longer than the 5 minutes I thought it would, due to annoying OAuth authentication errors.... turns out because I needed to install the pear oauth module. Would have been nice to realise this sooner, ie some sort of list of server requirements, but hey ho.
Tyne Tour - a new one for my kayaking repertoire! I wanted to go last year but was away working, so was quite excited about actually going this time.
Hexham is a long way away, so we left at lunchtime in order to get there at a reasonable hour and perhaps avoid the worst of the traffic.
But nooo. There'd been an accident on the M42, so it took 2.5 hours to go about 8 miles. Then we hit rush hour around Nottingham, and at some point stopped for food too, so eventually reached our Travelodge (yes, really) in Gateshead at something like half 9. urgh, long journey.
On Saturday morning we met up the rest of CCC in Hexham, who seemed to be suffering various levels of hangover, but had not frozen to death in their tents as it had been a fairly warm night. typical!
Then it was time for the Tyne. The North Tyne, to be precise, from Barrasford to the campsite in Hexham. This section involves paddling past bits of Hadrian's Wall - proof of quite far North we were!
About a million boats on the water, of all varieties (plastic kayaks, ww racers, canoes and even the odd raft). Warden's Gorge in particular - this rapid is quite hyped up: you can't get out and inspect it, you can't portage it, don't take novices down it, blah blah etc.
Not actually all that gnarly - the majority of our group made it down no problems, then sat at the bottom watching carnage from other groups (and playing on the nice surf wave there, whilst dodging empty kayaks, swimmers and swamped open boats).
After that, there was fish and chips, and then fireworks! Properly decent loud fireworks, and no attempts to put them to crappy music. Excellent!
The final part of Saturday's excitement was the ceilidh. I've never been to one before, and it's many years since I did country dancing in primary school, so I wasn't necessarily very good at it... but so much fun, if chaotic - at one point I was pretty much just being used as a battering ram/human shield, argh.
Back to the tents, where I slept very well without feeling at all cold 
Hooray for thermals, cowsuit, and sleeping bag (and the general shared warmth benefits of having other people in the tent).
Outside was somewhat less warm.. in fact, when we got up the tent was nicely iced over. brrr!
Having packed the frozen tents up, we headed to the Tees. Some ran HF-LF, then we all met up at Barnard Castle to paddle down to Winston Bridge.
A gorgeous bit of river! It always helps when the sun's out, and with autumn colours in the trees too.... lovely
Whorlton Lido
I really enjoyed the river too - a little more water might have been nice, as the end section in particular was a bit of a scrape. Not swimming on Abbey Rapids would also have been nice... And... continue reading »
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