Last weekend was the start of October. Yet we had 27° and glorious sunshine. What's that all about? Supposed to be autumn, not a very late summer...
Anyway Saturday was far too hot and stuffy for me to feel motivated to do anything, so I chilled out at home and read an entire book.
On Sunday I got up early for the rugby, then headed off in a Hay-on-Wye direction for yet more walking. Once I got the other side of Hereford the sun vanished, but my car was still telling me it was 25°.
Parked up near Priory Wood, and headed off to finish the remaining English bit of the Wye - ie the gap left from cutting my last walk short. I'd got it pegged at about 6 or 7km, so wasn't expecting it to take very long.
a busy day for open boats on the river
Which, for the most part, was true... Getting to Castleton took very little time or effort - through a few fields and wooded bits, with nice views over the river.
Sadly getting back to the car was not so quick and easy, and involved about half an hour of walking getting more and more frustrated around the same field playing "hunt the footpath". The path in to the field was signposted, but there was no sign at all of the way out. (there was a stile in a completely different place to the path on the map that just went into the hedge though - not helpful!) After much frustration I resorted to just forcing my way through the undergrowth in the place I thought the path should be. After a few metres I did spot a footpath sign so had guessed right, but grrrr.
So that took half an hour and 1km longer than I'd expected. Ho hum.
Drove into Hay, ate my lunch, and set off heading towards Llowes. More easy walking, following the river through fields. Then things got a bit more interesting, as the path forks. Option 1 is to continue following the riverbank. Option 2 is half a mile longer, and involves walking up a hill. I went for the high road, and it was well worth it for the views - despite the weather being a bit hazy and overcast.
it's definitely autumn!
On reaching Llowes, the two route options join up again. I turned around here, and headed back to Hay via the low road.
18km walked in total, leaving the Wye 75% complete - that certainly justified another lovely ice cream. This time, a delicious mango and passion fruit sorbet 
Here's a GPS trace of most of "Y Wal" at Afan. There's a bit missing because at that point I took my coat off (with gps logger in the pocket) and shoved it into the depths of my backpack where it couldn't lock on to the satellites. oops. I realised this mistake, and moved it to somewhere more sensible at the next stopping point!
Anyway, yes. Red mountain biking - probably not my normal choice for a weekend's activity, but this was a bit of a uni reunion type thing, involving many keen bikers. Plus a few of us with somewhat less experience to slow them down (the 24ish km route took about 4 hours, oops)
I do enjoy mountain biking - but it's never going to be one of my main sports. Far too much risk of hurting myself! And I'll freely admit that my bike is perhaps not cut out for too much abuse.. but at least it's pretty
Obviously I'd fixed the frayed gear cable after my last excursion, but while doing that I also took the opportunity to replace the brake cables - with pink ones! Pimp my bike, haha. The boys looked at me like I'm some sort of lunatic, but then again they probably realise that already...
mud, bikes and scenery! not sure why my saddle's at such an odd angle...
I've biked at Afan once before, on a different red trail (the one that's currently closed). From that, I remember endless horrible uphill to start with, then nice swoopy singletrack and a few terrifyingly steep downhill bits.
This one... pretty much the same! All the 'up' is at the start - which seems to take forever, but at least it gets it out of the way. Then the more interesting bits! Again, lots of nice singletrack. But nothing too scary and steep, so I was mostly really enjoying it. I'm not very good at actually standing up on the pedals, but I think I'd improved a bit by the end and generally felt mostly in control of things. So that's good
Sadly I had to miss out on the rest of the weekend - camping, drinking and apparently not very much surfing because of hangovers - due to other commitments. But it was very good to catch up with people again, yay.
Do now need to invest in some cycling gloves though. And figure out why my rear brakes were sticking so much...
I'm spending a large amount of my spare time at the moment editing photos. This is the one 'downside' of spending weekends out and about! It also creates backlogs of actual blog posts (ie the words to go with the pictures!), oops.
Here's a small hint about where I went walking last Sunday:
Books and bookshops wherever you look. Must be Hay on Wye!
I arrived around lunchtime, having got up early to watch Wales put in a fantastic effort against South Africa in their opening game of the rugby world cup (far more entertaining than watching England miss kicks the previous morning 
). Hopefully this won't count as peaking too soon....
Anyway, back to my walk. I got my passport stamped, ate lunch, and headed off. The footpath sneaks around the top edge of the town, then goes off in a NE direction back over the border into England, and through some fields.
Fields gave way to golf course, where I was hoping to make some joke revolving around the Mark Twain quote "golf is a good walk spoiled" but actually, it was quite nice there - ok, I had to wait to cross a few greens to avoid getting hit by golf balls, but the path was well marked and had a series of animal sculptures along it for added interest.
After the golf course, I made it through one more field before the clouds above decided to empty themselves. Cue frantic dash to get my coat on, and the waterproof cover over my rucksack! The rain lasted all of ten minutes, and we were back to beautiful sunshine. Make your mind up please weather...
Eventually I reached Priory Wood. A quick check of the map at this point revealed that I was still nowhere near my planned turnaround point (Castleton, where I'd ended the previous bit of walk). Here I made the decision to cut the walk short and head back. I'm not really sure what went wrong - I'd measured the route on a map beforehand as 15 or 16km (10 miles), but looking at what I'd done and what was left it was suddenly looking like actually being nearer 20, and with not enough time left in the afternoon. My shortened route ended up being about 12km.
So that was a bit annoying - and leaves me with a small 'gap' that I'll need to go back and fill at some point. And I can't quite yet brag about having finished all the English bits of river. Nearly though!
It also did mean taking a different route back to Hay than I'd planned. I walked down through Clifford and along the verges of the B4350 through another minor rain shower.
Once back in Hay I wandered around the town, took more photos, and had a rather delicious cherry yoghurt ice cream. yum!
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