No, it still doesn't mean what most hope it does...
I posted a while back about a Big B******* Walking club for the larger types amongst
us, and since then, it went quiet, and when I say quiet, the whole world went
quiet because I’ve been busy doing other things, but then I was reminded that
last year was the busiest year I’ve ever had, and I still found the time to do
other things somehow, and so I started dusting off everything else.
There’s been three walks since the first, and I’ve got the images from
two of them (which is a real shame, because the first of the bunch was a truly
epic thing, and one that we’ll have to repeat at some point to get the images
of all the things that we saw.
But I digress, the key point here is in getting walking in the first
place, and it’s a dull thing to do for a lot of people, but far less so when
you’re in good company, and I wonder for many if that’s the reason why no one
goes walking.
That and you don’t want to be in the company of slim types all dressed
in expensive walking gear leaving you behind and discussing middle England...
So this time we took a walk down from my place to the Barnsley Canal,
and from there along the canal to the edge of Notton and then back to my place,
here’s what we found along the way...
There’s a lot more green in Barnsley than many think...
There is such a thing as a Canal Club...
The Canal once flooded its banks, to the point that they built an
overflow into the side of the canal to channel any such problems safely away,
however, in the thirty years since it overflowed, it’s never even got as far as
the overflow... Still, best prepared and
all that...
There are strange cthulhoid markings on the path, with indications of
what you can find in all directions (even if you can’t go in those
directions...)
There are maps that cheerfully point out where you are, and just how
damn far it is before you get to the next stopping point...
Stand by Me isn’t the only
place you can find railway tracks to walk next to, although there were
decidedly less trains to dodge here...
There used to be a lot of
bridges in the area, many of them leading to who only knows where...
Some of them led to nowhere...
And so we finished up walking along the indicated path that said that
the way home was this way, and ended
up walking all the way down a ragged field wondering where it was leading, as
it turns out, it was leading down to a large set of dogs and a semi
understanding owner, who gave us the option of crawling through hawthorns or
walking the two miles back across ragged fields to go the other way.
We elected to take the hawthorne route, and so established that large
pairs of armoured gloves are your friend when walking (if you can get a set
that look like Marine Power Fists, let us know, we’ll take two), and that
walking in T shirts isn’t as smart as it is cool.
All in all, good number of miles done in excellent company, and we’ve
done it again just recently, so more on that shortly.
