We had a plan this morning to be up earlyish and get to the allotment before it got too hot up there. Ady woke me with a cup of tea at about 930am so that blew that idea, until I got downstairs all ready to go in my old jeans and he told me he’d already been 🙂 He’d woken early so gone up there before anyone was up and done it all :). Have I mentioned he is lovely? 🙂
So that put us at a bit of a loose end and after discussions we decided to drive up to Truleigh Hill – much talked about this week in respect of Christmas Camp – and go for a walk around that area. I guess we got there about 1130am and despite plans for a short walk we didn’t get back to the car til after 2pm.
We paused at a bench to admire the view and have some food and drink and Davies and I spotted a fox shoot across the path infront of two horses which looked so odd during broad daylight. We saw loads of buzzards, a lapwing and a cuckoo too.
We then walked downhill for a while, knowing we would therefore have to walk uphill again. We were going through a field with access rights but didn’t want to take the logical footpath so carried on up what looked to be a well trodden path which took us past a really cool tree that was almost entirely hollow for most of the trunk.
The path sort of ran out but we were already far enough into the field to decide to carry on. We knew there were cows thanks to all the cow pats but no sign of them. We found the bottom of the field with no gate and realised we’d need to either retrace our steps or walk along the other fence to see if there was a gate so decided to carry on parallel with the open of crossing the field again later. In the end we nipped over the fence in a dip which made it easy to cross and took us onto a path. It didn’t seem to be a proper footpath though and took us through the middle of a huge herd of cows on both side of the fence (the field we were in and the one next to it). Aside from a couple of frisky calves they were utterly unconcerned with us but did make us think this wouldn’t be the right field to take Marcus, Michelle and Chloe on a nice countryside walk through 😉 😆
The heat and all the up and down-hilling of it had us all flagging rather by the end and grateful to get back to the shady car. We stopped at Shoreham on the way home for me to get a couple of bits for dinner today and a picnic tomorrow and then came home.
I made ham in coke along with various vegetables including our own broad beans from the allotment, which I didn’t eat myself and the kids were less keen on cooked (they like to eat them raw from the pod) but Ady told me were lovely. While it was cooking Davies DS’d (Ady got him Night at the Museum 2 and he was enjoying exploring that), Ady and Scarlett did various outsidey things including playing with the chickens and planting some stuff.
We had dinner and talked about various things including What We’ve Learnt Today (we forgot yesterday) – Scarlett had learnt it was the 150th anniversary of Big Ben starting to keep time, Ady learnt that the world record for the most tomatoes off one plant in a season was 10,000 fruits, Davies learnt the word and purpose of stillages and I’ve learnt a bit about the theory of cellular memory in organ donation cases. My learning led to all sorts of discussion including the term ‘anecotal’, the types of evidence you could cite in things, organ donation generally and how we all felt about it.
I was intending to cycle to the allotment to do the watering but everyone wanted to come and it was such a nice evening I decided the midday trek would be sufficient exercise for it not to matter if I didn’t bike and so we drove up and watered.
Back home the kids had showers and then a chapter of George before bed and I’m about to check train times for the morning and head for bed myself.
rofl. Def wouldn’t be a nice countryside walk!
Comment by Michelle — 02 June 2009 @ 12:18 am