9 May 2012 (Wednesday) - Shadoxhurst to Coldblow


Admittedly we did have a late night last night. But we didn't wake until 10am. I spent a little while mucking about with on-line surveys, and then tried another little money-spinner that I doubt will come to anything (but you never know). Following on from yesterday's excursion and last Saturday's outing a cousin suggested I put my walking routes on-line. People will then pay me to use the routes I've lovingly created. A good idea in theory. In practice the Internet was running so slowly I got rather fed up with the whole thing and gave up in disgust having only uploaded one walk in half an hour. I then got even more angry by putting the mobile app for it onto my phone.

To calm my nerves we went out delivering catalogues to the masses. Not all of the masses were enamoured with my efforts. As I popped one catalogue through the door I heard a child screaming "Mummy - quick - Mummy - quick". Realising that what goes on in other people's houses is none of my business I left them to it. But Mummy had been alerted. Mummy followed me down the road and handed the catalogue back to me (handling it as if it was a dog turd). Looking down her nose at me, she told me that she didn't buy from the door step. Her loss, really(!)

We got a new tyre for the "er indoors TM" - mobile, collected Fudge, and set off to Shadoxhurst to try out my new app. I rather hoped I could record the route we walked. I'm not sure what I did wrong, but for all that it recorded time and distance, the route wasn't saved to my profile. So when we got home I did it manually. Mind you the walk was quite a good one. Six and a half miles in three and a bit hours. The paths could have been marked better in parts, but thanks to "really skillfull navigation TM" we got round despite serious mud. At one point Fudge was literally belly deep in the stuff. And we had a dodgy five minutes when we encountered a horse on a bridleway. Fudge hadn't seen anything like it before. If ever a dog had a "wtf?" expression, it was Fudge this afternoon.
We'll go back to do this walk mob-handed at some point. But not for a few weeks - there is too much mud at the moment. For all the talk of drought, the swamps need to dry out quite a lot before doing that route again.

And then home. We could have taken Fudge straight home. But he'd been in mud which was over half as deep as he was tall. And he'd been eating horse turds too. We couldn't really take him home in that state. So having got him filthy (for the second time in a week) we took him home for a bath. Fortunately Fudge is the rare dog that likes baths, so scrub passed off relatively uneventfully. The bath was a state afterwards though.

And with Fudge taken home we had a really good bit of scoff for tea. And a bottle of wine as well. One of the advantages of having (pretty much) given up the beer means that the wine takes its effect pretty quickly.

Hic(!)

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