9 May 2021 (Sunday) - Blue Bell Hill

Waking two minutes before the alarm went off I came downstairs to find not a turd nor a tiddle to be seen. I later found out that er indoors TM” had dealt with Sid an hour previously.

 

I made toast and had a look at the Internet. Reading Facebook was something of an eye-opener this morning. There were several posts on various groups about people whose medical conditions had deteriorated during the pandemic. Looking for someone to blame, quite a few (seemingly uneducated) people were tearing in to health care workers. Public opinion is such a fickle thing. A year ago everyone was standing on the doorstep banging their saucepans supporting a frankly marvellous NHS; this morning it was “burn a nurse” with everyone wondering why all the money that had been donated by Captain Tom hadn’t solved every illness known to medical science.

I had an email with a report  from someone who’s only recently taken up geocaching. He’d found one of my caches yesterday. It was broken. To be fair to the bloke he did the technically right thing in posting a “Needs Maintenance” log, but he could have replaced the broken one with a new one in less time than it took to post that  Needs Maintenance” log. I shall replace it when I get chance (which will be some time in mid-June).

 

The sky looked rather black this morning, but I took Sid out anyway. He needs a daily walk, and he will get one whether he likes it or not. He seemed to like it for the first ten yards, then the novelty wore off.

We took fifteen minutes to walk what any of the other dogs could do in two, but Sid’s legs aren’t what they once were.

 

And with Sid walked, we settled him and took the other two to meet up with Karl, Tracey and Charlotte. We had thought about walking on the marsh today, but the weather forecast was a tad iffy for there, so we went  to Blue Bell Hill instead. We had a very good walk following the “Lock Down Loop” series of geocaches.

We started off walking a country lane, but the route took in bridleways and footpaths with pretty woodlands and some amazing views of the Medway valley.

As we walked we had to be careful of the cyclists – I’ve never seen so many of them out and about. Usually they can be rather self-obsessed with no road sense whatsoever whilst flying along at breakneck speeds, but today’s dozens of cyclists were going at little more than walking pace and were all friendly and chatty.

The bluebells were seemingly everywhere – so pretty. However it was a shame that the first stretch of the walk was so littered. People had clearly gone a long way out of their way to go fly-tipping. Such a shame – is it *really* that difficult to drive to the tip?

 

Geocache-wise it was an excellent route. Good hints and straightforward finds. Some more tricky than others but none so difficult as to need an age to find. Mind you one cache was odd – all that was left was the paper log of the thing. So (bearing in mind my rant of earlier) we popped that log into one of the small plastic pots that *we* carry for just such an eventuality.

 

I took a few photos as we walked today. As we came to the end of the walk we came past the Robin Hood pub… we were tempted to stop for a pint, but the garden was heaving with the normal people, and there was a long queue of people waiting to be assigned a table, so we came home and had a pint in the garden instead.

 

er indoors TM” woke me in time for dinner. We had a rather good dinner washed down with that bottle of plonk I got from the organic vineyard (for nineteen quid!) last Tuesday. Dinner was rather good; the bottle of plonk was quite frankly a disappointment. I’ve had a lot of bottles of plonk costing a third of the price which are three times as good.

As we scoffed we watched this week’s episode of “Lego Masters”. That was very good. I love watching it, but would I want to be on the show? No!! My Lego city is quite good (even if I do say so myself), but I do that for an hour here of there over years. Could I spend twelve hours continuously making a masterpiece?

Probably not…

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