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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