12 May 2018 (Saturday) - A Bit Wet

Just before bed time last night I was reading my nephew’s drunken messages on Facebook. I got up this morning to find that he’d “blown” all over his mate’s kitchen at half past four this morning and that my brother had been deployed to assist in the clean-up operation.
Oh, how I chuckled when I read my brother’s posting on Facebook.
I was quite surprised at just how many other people were commenting on my brother’s whinge before six o’clock; it isn’t just me who is up early.
Other than spewing nephews, not much else had happened overnight in cyberspace. We got ourselves and the hounds together, and set off.

As we drove up the motorway we saw a Virgin hot air balloon. At one point it looked as though the balloon was on course for the motorway; it as rather low. And once on the M25 we were delayed slightly by an “incident”. But soon enough we were in West Sussex. With time on our hands we stopped off for McBreakfast. The plan had been to meet Karl, Tracey and Charlotte at Wiston; who would have believed that they too would be at McDonalds? And who would believe that "er indoors TM" had never before had a sausage and egg McMuffin? She liked it, as did the dogs.

We drove on to Wiston, parked up and set off on what was very much a walk of two halves. Our plan was to walk the “Wiston Rewind” series of geocaches (in reverse order); taking an early detour to walk the “Ashurst to Spithandle Lane” series (as it was on our way). It was probably a good plan…
It started well; we had a good walk. We saw pheasants (before the dogs did) and even deer in the distance. Treacle climbed ten feet up a tree, both dogs ate poo, we’d walked about six miles when we felt spots of rain…

I’d been checking the weather forecasts all day yesterday. The forecast for where we were had it as being dry until three o’clock, then a twenty per cent chance of rain. In theory we would have been able to have got round most of the walk in the dry…
At half past mid-day we were sheltering under a random tree waiting for the rain to pass. We then spent about an hour going from tree to tree in search of shelter.

Eventually the rain slackened off and we were able to get a move on. But it didn’t stop; it just slackened off. Even with coats on we got rather wet. We got to the pub at Steyning, and stopped to dry off. As my pants steamed we had a pint (it would have been rude not to).
As we finished the pint the rain outside turned torrential so I declared “Emergency Plan “B” (it’s a camping thing) and we had a second pint. And a third. By the time a large port had been sunk the rain had slackened off to a medium monsoon, so in a triumph of idiot enthusiasm over common sense we braved the elements and carried on.
Despite the weather I took quite a few photos as we walked. It was ironic that I’d bought some waterproof trousers just for this sort of eventuality and had left them at home.

We stopped off for a burger on the way home; what with one thing and another we were rather later finishing the walk than we’d intended and were hungry. And then we got stuck on the M25...

Everyone else had seemingly been watching the Eurovision song contest tonight. Once home and bathed we turned it on to see what we’d been missing. We turned it off after less than a minute; there was some woman who wasn’t singing – she was howling.
Still… everyone else seemed to like it…

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