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13 November 2016 (Sunday) - Dry Hill

Over brekkie I watched yesterday’s episode of “Thunderbirds are Go”. It was only the fifth episode of the second series; I hadn’t missed the start of the second season by much, and I’ve now seen most of the episodes I had missed via catch-up TV. I quite like it; there are plenty of references to the original and to other Gerry Anderson stuff if you pay attention. There was even a South Park reference which surprised me.

Looking out of the window I could see the weather was a complete turn-about on yesterday. I think my little dog had also seen that and he knew what was coming. He turned his nose up at his breakfast; he never eats his breakfast when he thinks we are going out. I tried to get him to eat some more (or any of it) but he wasn’t keen. So I gave up trying to feed a dog that wouldn’t eat and we set off for deepest Surrey where we met Karl Tracy and Charlotte.

We’d been talking about walking the Dry Hill Hike for some time; today we got round to it. I wouldn’t say the hill was “dry”; but it was certainly not as wet as it might have been. A lot of the route we walked was on bridleways and country lanes, and despite a lot of the paths being obviously heavily used by horses, the mud was superficial at worst. As we walked we went past some rather beautiful houses. We saw lots of horses and their riders, a friendly robin, and we even rescued a little mouse from my dog. And at 11am we observed a two-minute silence on a little diversion to an iron-age fort.
Geocaching-wise we managed a clean sweep. We went along having spoken with the owner of the series who’d felt two caches might need replacing, but found the lot. One of the supposedly missing ones was laying out in the open in a field of crops some seven metres from the obvious hide, but we left it where (we felt) it was supposed to be. Mind you the walk was very “old-school”. We walked a series of twenty caches; the same route could have had forty. It was an excellent walk but had I organised the route I would have put more caches on it. But then these older series are more spread out.

After seven miles walking we got back to the cars rather earlier than planned, so we got out of muddy boots and wandered down the road to the nearby pub. We sat in front of a roaring fire and enjoyed a pint of Harvey’s best bitter. And then a pint of London Pride went down rather well. I was eyeing the Harvey’s Old Ale, but with a fifty-plus miles journey home along the motorway there is only so far one can go without a tiddle stop.

As we pulled up so our new neighbour was coming out of next door. We chatted for a few minutes; he seems pleasant enough. Here’s hoping.
I then hosed the mud off of my dog’s underneath and off of our boots. "er indoors TM" had been given a list of instructions from "Daddy’s Little Angel TM" so as she set off on her chores I sparked up my lap-top. I took a few photos as we walked; I published those for the world to see, then settled in front of the telly.

I watched Friday’s episode of South Park; I’m now pretty sure who I thought was supposed to be Michael Jackson is actually supposed to be Donald Trump’s wife.
I watched another episode of Game of Thrones. It was rather good.
Then there was David Attenborough and Planet Earth II. It was very good.
And then there was something of a disappointment. “Mars” is supposed to be a documentary about the first manned mission to Mars (in 2033) with flashbacks to current-day footage from Space X explaining the technology. The bits from Space X were interesting. The speculative bits were rather rubbish really. Obviously made from dramatic effect they were somewhat lacking in any kind of scientific basis. Even the Apollos of nearly fifty years ago didn’t have single stage rockets going from Houston to the Moon and back.
I’d been looking forward to the show… I hope the second episode is an improvement on the first…

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