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28 October 2017 (Saturday) - Dartford Marshes

I slept like a log until 3am last night. Not surprising, really. I went for a tiddle, and came back to bed to find I had to fight a wolf-pack to be allowed any space on the bed. I then dozed fitfully until the alarm went off.
Over brekkie I had a look at the Internet. One advert piqued my interest; there was a photo of a nearly naked Lucy Lawless in the clutches of a similarly un-clad lady with the caption “Lucy Lawless Finally Confirms The Rumour”. Being a very shallow sort of person I couldn’t help but wonder what rumours were confirmed, but hoped that being nearly naked and in the clutches of a similarly un-clad lady might have something to do with it.
It didn’t.
The link went to some old rubbish about the TV series Xena Warrior Princess. That was two seconds of my life wasted. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so easily distracted by un-clad ladies.

I also had an email from the nice people at Pieroth inviting me to their wine tasting event next Sunday at the Ashford International Hotel. The part of me that went out on the beer last night wants to go. The part of me that lays awake at night worrying about money knows this would be a silly thing to do. Pieroth wines are good wines, but I’ve been to these events before. They offer “tastes” and within a few minutes you are at the point of having your pants as a hat and singing songs about sailors when out comes the order forms and you find yourself blowing over four hundred quid on a couple of dozen bottles of plonk that you don’t actually want.
I shall give that a miss…

We got our stuff (and dogs) together and drove up to Dartford where we met Karl, Tracey and Charlotte. On New Year’s Day we had planned to go there and to walk the geo-series that had gone out for the New Years Day event, but the weather was against us. During the year we made plans to go there, but for various reasons events conspired against us.
We finally got there today.

We met up at the recommended parking spot only to find that there were dozens of notices saying that you couldn’t park there, and a parked car had a parking ticket. So we drove up the road half a mile to somewhere where we could park. We had a rather good walk across the marshes, round the rather nice housing estate, and along the river Thames. The views of the Queen Elizabeth bridge were rather amazing; despite having been over it so many times I had no idea just how huge the thing was.
It was a warm autumn day; half way round we stopped an ice cream van; we all like ice cream. And three quarters of the way round we found the Pier hotel and had a well-deserved couple of pints.
Geocache-wise this was a rather good walk. We found all of our targets relatively easily. I say “found”; we went knowing that two were missing. We’d messaged with the chap who’d hidden them and arranged to replace the missing ones. One wasn’t actually missing.

I dozed most of the way home; once home both dogs had a bath. What with fox poo and river mud both were rather grubby. We had a rather good bit of dinner, and then with "er indoors TM" off out to the Saturday film night I settled in front of the telly to watch the 2005 film of “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. I turned it off after ten minutes.

I might watch more of “The Expanse” in a bit. Or I might just sit here and doze…

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