Grand Walking Plans 2011 – an update

Published 20 September 2011

A completely blank signpost

So it’s September. Where does the time go, eh? Especially as September marks six months since I published my Grand Walking Plans for 2011.

And as the autumn begins to creep towards us I thought I’d give a quick overview of what I’d been up to. So here goes…

My Grand Walking Plans had three long distance trails listed, so lets go through each.

The biggest item on the list was The Southern Upland Way which is an official Long Distance Route across the Scottish Borders. At 212 miles and often with limited accommodation available, it’s a challenging route. To make it more challenging I decided I’d camp it.

Despite some terrible weather early on I completed the whole thing in just eighteen days, starting it in early June and (mostly) enjoyed the experience. Since then I’ve been busy sorting out the hundreds of photographs and typing up the thousands of words I wrote about the trip. The good news is that I’ve now on the editing phase of the text and hopefully October and November will finally see it all published. Due to its size I’ll probably be abridging it for the website but a full version will be available to download for Kindle and as a PDF.

Whilst on the trip I also did some filming and I’m hoping to be able to do at least four videos relating to the walk, and I also found time to record another series of Camp Food Taste Tests. Keep your eyes peeled…

The Glyndŵr’s Way National Trail was the first achievement for the year, which Catherine and myself did in April between Easter and the Royal Wedding. Again I wrote up the experience but for various time related reasons I haven’t been able to type it all up yet – the notebook is sat on my desk waiting for me to finish sorting out the Southern Upland Way. Bear with and hopefully we’ll get there soon.

Also on the list was The Ridgeway – an 87 mile route from Wiltshire to Ivinghoe Beacon.

Catherine and myself did the first three days in early March and were joined by some friends to do another two days later in the month. You can read all about the exploits over on my Ridgeway pages.

Unfortunately we’ve not managed to schedule a time to finish off the remaining day and a half of walking that’s needed to complete the walk. With any luck it may happen in October or November but so far it’s not happened.

And finally there was The Mystery Walk. This was a plan to do something – anything – at the end of May. In the end I went to the Lake District with my new tent with some grand plans which mostly didn’t come to fruition. I suffered some terrible rain and eventually came home a day early.

But whilst I was there I did manage to bag four Wainwright summits and I’ve recently got back from a second long weekend to the Lakes where I got another four. OK so there are about 200 odd of the things but it’s still enough to make me decide to add on a “Wainwrights” section to Rambling Man so you can look forward to some new content on them coming very soon. Plus it will give me an incentive to do some more!

One thing not on the list is that I’ve recently started walking the North Downs Way in day hikes in-between job hunting. It’s been slow progress so far in that I’ve only managed to do two days but I’m hopeful that I’ll get at least half done this year. Naturally you’ll be able to read about it here when I do.

So that’s that then. But one final thing to say is that Rambling Man is now on Facebook and Twitter. Why not like/follow us over there too!

Lots going on, some things still to do and some more added. Blimey, I feel exhausted just thinking about it.

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