Cheshire day out

This week the three of us set off on Saturday morning in Flora's camper van for an 11 mile walk in Cheshire. We arrived at about 10.30 and parked up by the Pheasant Inn and the Candle factory near Beeston. Flora had found a route on tinternet which followed some of the Sandstone trail and sounded very pleasant. Unfortunately, as is often the case with descriptions of walks, the actual walking of it wasn't quite so straight forward as it sounded. Hence after the first half hour or so we were lost! We figured out later that where the description blithley directed us to continue on a path for 4 miles until we reached a castle, it had failed to mention that we'd better turn right or we'd end up going completely the wrong way. So we ended up wandering along a very busy main road for a while which was a little hairy and involved us very nearly getting squished by some fast moving lorries! The highlight of nearly ending up as roadkill was coming across 2 donkeys in a field. It would seem Angela is very keen on donkeys and she made a beeline for their field when we spotted the first one. However, it turned out that donkeys aren't so keen on Angela! Said donkey started to hee haw its head off in what looked like distress of some sort and legged it across the field to its friend, they then both ran in the opposite direction as Ange approached to say hello. Ange was then highly offended when they indulged in what nature intended and we took that to be our cue to move on!

Just in case you're unfamiliar with donkeys here's two which are based in a Derbyshire Donkey Sanctuary

http://drupal.thedonkeysanctuary.org.uk/node/2971

We were fortunate enough to then come across a map of the sandstone trail and associated paths, from which we realised we were heading in the wrong direction. We turned around and repeated our getting squished trip along the road. When we finally made it back to the route we were supposed to be on we realised we were running out of time and had to abandon half the walk and head back to where we'd parked up. The rest of the route, which we managed to follow without incident, was very pleasant. We followed the directions up to Rawhead which is the highest point on the Sandstone trail so at least we did some up hill and down dale to prepare for Jordan.

We were really surprised to find there were some quite big snow drifts still around which, of course, I was obliged to trek across ;)

The views from our elevation across the Cheshire plain were quite impressive...

We made it back to the Pheasant Inn having only walked, a disappointing, 5.5 miles. We were even more put out to find that the Pheasant was heaving and we couldn't even get a seat for a coffee. We consoled ourselves with a cuppa in Flora's camper which was very nice and where we didn't feel scruffy in comparison to the Cheshire set!

Flora and Angela have managed to write off to a number of companies and football teams asking for sponsorship and/or the opportunity to shake our buckets on their premises. Flora wrote to Manchester United and Man City and emphasised she was talking about buckets and not buttocks!!! We were all delighted to get a date for a bag pack at Marks and Spencer's at Cheshire Oaks. That's on August 17th, so if anyone would like to help out please let us know. Alternatively, come along, buy some M+S food and chuck money in our buckets.

My plan to walk the dogs each morning before work went okay except for Tuesday when I needed to be in work early to pack up my office to move out before we're refurbished and Wednesday when I was in Hertfordshire. The dogs seemed to enjoy their walks and my husband also enjoyed his first week back in work, so it was a success all round! I'll let you know whether I manage to prise myself out of bed this week too. I'm intending to try Tai Chi again this week and am hoping that, as I've improved my general fitness since the last time I tried it, perhaps the warm up won't nearly kill me this time!

Next week I will definitely tell you more about the route our trek will take so you'll have more of an idea about what we're going to be doing.

TTFN, Pauline.