There's much oddness going on here - over the last five days I've had several hundreds of "Guests" looking at this blog's archive for September 2007, and I've no idea why. No other archives, pages or posts are being visited any more than usual. Any thoughts?
I went to the Post Office to send a parcel.
On display was a modern representation of a bit of nostalgia... a Thunderbirds motion-stamp set:
The grown-up side of me started to walk away, but by then the boyhood side had rifled through the coins in my pockets and bought the thing.
It's cool. Get one.
... the one with the wa-ger-ly trail?
Come on, sing along, you all know the tune...
... but what about the numbers?
The path to High Street
I've been doing some rough sums, trying to work out how much the quest to do the 214 has cost so far and how much more it'll cost me to finish them during the next 18 months (I aim to get them all done before I turn 50)...
The total so far is 192 but the actual count is 200, as some tops have been revisited.
Of these 200:
For this costing, I've made the following assumptions:
So...
Tot up that lot and it comes to £3945.88 which works out at an average of about £19.73 for each of the 200 times I've topped-out.
Mickleden and Great Langdale
So, what of the other 22 Wainwrights that I've yet to knock off the list?
I've looked at the map and I reckon that at the very least I'm looking at 4 YHA visits (a total of 9 nights), 2 wildcamping weekends and 2 mildcamping weekends. For this costing, I've made the following assumptions:
So...
Tot up that lot and it comes to £636.44 which works out at an average of about £28.93 for each of the 22 tops still to do.
OK, so it's gone up a lot, but I reckon it's not too much to pay for being in places like this:
Angle Tarn
I trust that somebody out there will check my maths 😉
Just hopping onto the bandwagon that started out as Maz's "My First Aid Kit" blog-post...
So, what's in the totally-waterproof 1litre Soup 'n Sauce bag?
And what's missing that's usually there but isn't?
Total weight when fully-stocked, including the bag, is 360g. Ok, so it's a bit heavy when compared to some of the lightweight versions out there, but bear in mind that I carry this kit whether I'm walking solo or in a group. Some of the tiny kits are obviously for solo use only, mine has to cope with the demands of a family with kids.
For me, the last two months of every year tend to be a bit fickle when it comes to getting in some hill-time. Factor in a bunch of birthdays, the inevitable Christmas shopping, the trips out to deliver pressies and the staying in to accept them, and there's precious little time left for getting away. It's not as if I can snatch the odd half-day or just bugger off one evening, overnight in the hills and then return the next morning - living in England's rotting industrial heartland means that any decent mountains are many hours of driving away, so any venture has to be long enough to provide a good return on the investment.
This year I'm taking a different approach - I've booked a weekend away, the rest of life will just have to STFU and fit in around it. Coniston beckons, a few of us have answered the call. Hopefully we'll find the right conditions to christen my new snooshows, maybe we'll even tick off a few more Wainwrights, but if we don't it'll be fun all the same.
Of course, while I'm away, somebody else will have the job of tidying up those loose ends. Here's a quick snapshot of the cause of the disorder:
Even though the two-week claim period hasn't yet expired, we couldn't continue looking after her without giving her a name. That process in itself was an ordeal - we'd made a long-list and couldn't agree, so we whittled it down to a short-list and still couldn't agree.
Eventually we put the names in a hat and Anna drew out the winning entry (which just happened to be the name that she put in... hmm...). Even now, we can't agree - the name is Elvy... or is it LV? Of course, now that the mog's been named it'll be hard if we have to let her go, despite her infuriating habit of chewing through my boot-laces and draw-cords!
Here, have a few more pics:
This little furry fiend had been hanging around the Close for at least four days and nights, hiding from fireworks and trying to scrounge titbits. Yesterday we relented, caught it* and took it in for the night. I've never seen a cat so hungry - it had no problems snatching the feeding-fork from my hands in order to glean the last morsels of food from it.
The local cat rescue folk have had a good look at her and have pronounced her to be about 10-weeks old and healthy... the vet considers her to be just over 8-weeks old and full of worms.
Anyway, it looks like we've been adopted by her. If she's not claimed in the next two weeks I suppose we'll be keeping her.
* We tempted it from a garden by offering it some cat-food, but during the grabbing operation it decided to have a damned good bite of my finger instead. This kitten does look cute and cuddly, but I can vouch for the fact that it has teeth like well-honed daggers - they went in all the way until they were grinding on the bone, and it didn't want to let go. If we keep it, I reckon we'll be giving it the understated name "Nipper".
