15 August 2024 (Thursday) - Longbeech Woods Again

I slept like a log last night and woke feeling surprisingly chirpy. I went into the garden and harvested dog turds; there weren’t that many. Either dogs were baking them,  or Bailey had already harvested them in her foul way.
I put peanut butter and marmalade on toast and had a look at the Internet as I do most mornings. Back in the day I used to read the newspaper. These days the internet is marginally more relevant to me and cheaper. The sites I frequent had less jubblies being flopped out than the paper used to have, but you can’t have everything. Today the internet was dull, which was probably for the best.
 
I Munzed, I wordled, and with “er indoors TM off to the office today I put a load of washing into scrub and took the dogs out. We drove through Stanhope where I capped a Flat Lou and got three scatters (as one does) then we went out to Longbeech Woods again. We had a really good walk on Tuesday, and having looked at the map I’d planned us a longer walk for today. Sadly we fell at the first hurdle when we parked up and discovered that everything to the west of Monkery Lane (about half the wood) was private land. But we had a good walk on the bit we were allowed on. We walked for over three miles and only saw one other group walking. Sadly their boxer dogs wanted to say hello, Bailey was terrified and ran off screaming, and Pogo wasn’t going to stand for that. There was a lot of woofing; fortunately the people with the boxer dogs knew what dogs were like and it all passed off amicably.
I took a few photos whilst we were out this morning.
 
After three miles we were back at the car park. A couple of days ago I mentioned that it was a shame that so many car parks deliberately exclude camper vans. But today I saw a classic example of why they do. A Belgian family had set up camp in the car park. A full-on camp including a toilet tent and a liberal scattering of all sorts of their clutter. They’d glared at us when we arrived and weren’t happy that as we walked back to our car we walked through where they were having an open-air family aerobics session in everyone’s way at eleven o’clock.
We came home. I hung out the washing, and squealed up the illegal camp site to the Woodland Trust. People stopping overnight, enjoying the place and moving on is one thing. People taking over more than half of a rather small car park to use as their personal domain is another.
 
There was a lot I could have cracked on with today, but I was still rather tired from Tuesday’s night shift, and it was hot outside. Nowhere near as hot as it has been, but still hot.
I slobbed on the sofa with the dogs.
I did snigger as we watched episodes of “Four in a Bed”; in this afternoon’s shows everyone seemed to hate everyone else. There was one particularly vicious woman from Norfolk who was actively sneering at another contestant for having quite so much chest on display.
 
“er indoors TM should be home soon. There’s talk of pizza…

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