Rumination: Aches and Pains

I keep this blog for tales of walking, it does not exist for any other purpose. The days of everyone thinking that a blog should cover every single fragment of detail from people's everyday lives has thankfully passed, and I will endeavour to keep away from adding details from the rest of my life here (that was for my Livejournal account, and I haven't logged into that for years!) However, sometimes the rest of my life interferes with my walking, and causes disruptions to my plans and that is what I'll be talking about today, so I apologise in advance for griping about my work and the physical toll it took on me over the summer. For a brief hiatus, I will talk about something other than walking, and if you are not interested, there are plenty more walks to come before the end of my first walking season!

Mirfield to Sowerby Bridge 18/08/12

An important thing to do when walking is to trust your map and to hold the idea that what the page states is where you should be going. The map is your friend and your helpful guide and you must believe in it and what it tells you, but sometimes it is wrong and will lead you astray, lead you into potentially dangerous places and you will wonder why the map misled you. Then you will realise that the map has one major limitation, it is only as good as the person reading it and the flaw is not with the map, it is with the interpretation of it, and you led yourself into peril and can be the only one to blame for your actions. If you are wondering how this relates to river and canal walking, read on...

Mirfield to Sowerby Bridge, via the Calder & Hebble Navigation path. 12.9 miles.

Wakefield to Mirfield 11/08/12

I've been resident in West Yorkshire for nearly 19 years now, and I'm amazed that I can still find areas near to Leeds that are still completely terra incognita to me, and that is the case today. Despite having taken all sorts of routes across the county over the years, my only interaction with the lands between Wakefield and Dewsbury has been tearing up and down the M1. I would have ridden that way taking the train from Morley to Wakefield via Mirfield but failure of the trains to run to time means that I have to go the long way round, via Leeds, before I can venture into the unknown.

Wakefield to Mirfield, via the Calder & Hebble Navigation path.  11.6 miles

Castleford to Wakefield 04/08/12

New Shoes: Does anyone else do the skit of discovering that somebody has new footwear and going 'Noo Shoos! Noo Shoos!' repeatedly? I do, and have no idea why! But it's new boots day for me, and having made no attempt of any kind to break them in, let's hope they're not going to rub me up, I'd worried that they might pinch a bit when I bought them, but today they felt a bit on the roomy side, so I hope my feet don't slide all around inside them. They're as comfy as you could want though, and it's going to be nice to be able to wade through puddles and not worry about leakage, and maybe I should take good care of them too, like scrubbing them occasionally and not letting them get them all scuffed up, I might finally look like a proper walker! So, let's hit the trail and get these new All-Leather babies dirty!

Castleford to Wakefield, via the Aire & Calder Navigation path. 9.8 miles

Settle to Ribblehead 28/07/12

This day's walk came about as I had a rejiggering of my walk schedule, as I had intended to join the FOSCL group for a walk from Dent to Ribblehead in August but changed my plan to attending this one as I figured that it would get in more useful territory for future reference, and would also start to stitch together my Dales walks with my other wanderings closer to home. It was first competitive day of the London Olympics too, and I had no real desire to veg away in front of the TV with that. Not that I'm one of those natural complainers who were all 'Boo! Waste of Taxpayer's Money!' before the thing had even gotten started, I'd consider myself more 'sporting disengaged' and had no desire to get suckered in like I did with the Beijing Olympics when I had a lot of time to fill between episodes of painting during 2008's flat redecorating.

Settle to Ribblehead. 14.7 miles

Egerton to Ramsbottom (almost) 21/07/12

Instead of additional walking on the 19th, I had my parents visit and took a nostalgic trip on the Scarborough Spa Express, getting in a repeat steam-hauled trip on the oft-travelled rails of 30 years ago. Only a three hour turnaround at the coast didn't allow much time for a wander into the unknown, but it did give me time for shopping, and Mountain Warehouse offered me up a pair of new walking boots to replace my leaky pair. So a successful (and expensive!) trip there, then, and as I've got my parents up country, that's a fine excuse to head over to Bolton for a family gathering and for me to get in a walk around the periphery of the West Pennine Moors.

Egerton to Ramsbottom (almost).  8.9 miles

Leeds to Castleford 17/07/12

Having done the walk along the Aire valley upstream from Leeds it seem only natural to do the path downstream as my next stretch of canal walking, and having chosen to start from Victoria Bridge to go south-east, a look at the Leeds waterfront guide has me realising that I have mad virtually no interaction with that area in all the time I've lived and worked in Leeds. I visited the Royal Armouries in 1997, and have had regular sessions in the Adelphi on Hunslet Road, but other than the regular bus rides over Leeds Bridge and an almost pathological obsession with the level of the Aire, I have no knowledge of the area. That needs to be rectified, and I reflect that my colleague who told me to walk the streets of Leeds might have been on to something after all.

Leeds to Castleford, via the Aire & Calder Navigation path.  13.2 miles