Foggy Walk

Woke up latish on Friday, about 9am, to thick fog. Could hardly see across the road. Had a good English breakfast, including some huge mushrooms we'd bought from the market yesterday. Andrea and I left the others clearing up,  and quickly walked up to the market to buy the veg for tonight's meal.

Then we set off for a walk, except for Val who didn't think she could walk that far. First we had to negotiate the market square where there was a nice market, and we stopped to look at some interesting stalls. One in particular caught our eye, it was selling wind chimes made out of old silver knives and forks, and pendants made out of farthings While I was looking at this stall I noticed my glasses didn't feel right, and realised a screw had come out. Luckily there was an optician nearby, and I took them in, felt a bit stupid when they noticed the lens was also missing, and I hadn't noticed. After some frantic searching round the stall I assumed I'd lost it, and opened my glasses case to put the broken glasses away. And there was the lens. I'd obviously put them on in the morning with a lens missing and hadn't noticed!

From there we set off on the the walk. Very misty and atmospheric, but not cold and it was pleasant walking. The castle looked very spooky in the mist.




Walked for a couple of hours, with me in charge of map reading, and only got mildly lost once.

Had a coffee stop where embarrassingly we realised we had more hip flakes than coffee flasks





Ended up at The Clive for lunch. Very nice place, and we managed a local pint, bottle of wine, crab sandwich and chips.

Next door was Ludlow food centre, a sort of glorified  farm shop which obviously we had to look round, but that made us a bit late setting off to get back, and it began to get dark, as well as more foggy.

For about a mile we walked through a very muddy lane, without the lovely views of Ludlow castle we normally get. The mud was worse than usual  and we all ended up very wet,

but soon made it back and into the Bulls Head for a drink. We'd walked 6 miles and the route's here:



Then back to the house for firelighting and food preparation. It was Children in Need night so the TV wasn't  brilliant, but we had a good time, a good Christmas dinner, including one of my mum's Christmas puddings and crackers

After dinner me, Julie and Andrea went for a walk and end up in the Wheatsheaf, a pub under one of the gatehouses.
Then came back, and made the traditional soup of all of the leftovers, managing  to fuse the kitchen lights in the process. Late to bed, about 1am.