No, not Henry The Thirst. Just plain Henry. You all know the score from Henry’s blog, so I’ll not go on too much except to say I was surprised (in a good way, of course) how same-old same-old Henners is with the exception of not swigging Death-By-Cider any more.
It’s official, the bosses at Coca-Cola are in talks with Henry’s agent* and a whole new marketing campaign will probably hit the nation any day now.
Just picture the bill-boards: “Capn Henry’s Favourite Swig - Diet Coke with a hint of Lemon, for that refreshing Piratey taste! Yarrrrrrrr!”**.

See, the same sort of things happened on this visit as previous: we all sat up really late, listened to a veritable torrent of top tunage, played Trivial Pursuit (I lost… again) followed by that silly party game where you have a name stuck to your forhead and have to ask yes/no questions to work out who you are. Having a good time, no need to get rat-asred. Well, I got slightly tipsy, tis true, but I *am* king, doncherknow, and I can use as many commas as I see fit. Life goes rambling on and it’s GOOD.

Keep it rolling, Henners. You’re free now. I’m proud of you, I hope you are too

And now, it’s time for the Gallery***

*cue dingly-dangly-ringly-tingly muzak*

Lovely lil cottage by umm, er, oh some lock or other…

… oddly, I was drawn to the tiles on the roof. Dunno why, just seemed a good idea at the time.

The whole cut is simply bursting with life. The difference between this and my previous visit is perhaps all the more striking due to the length of time away… Lillies everywhere!

Millions of these little blighters all over the shop, and only one almost recognisable picture to show for it. Meh. I don’t even know for sure if it is a dragonfly, but then I’m not into botany.

BUT! Upon passing under a bridge…

…I happened to have the old box-brownie to hand and caught me some ducklings! Yay!

So I celebrated by fiddling with my macro settings again.

Didn’t have as much luck with the digital zoom, however. I’ll wager Send Church is no way near as fuzzy in real life.

A gloriously sunny weekend, quite surprisingly. Doom-laden clouds that lurked all around and about on Sunday morning soon gave way to Scorchio, cornflower-blue skies and a great deal of breathing deep, sighing contendedly and uttering the immortal words: ‘ahhhh, this is the life!’

Nice to see more ducklings have escaped the dreaded Pike; The Twins in particular.

To round the day off nicely, I magged up another windlass to replace the one I *ahem* mislaid. Hoorah! Again I’ll paint it in the standard Swedish Livery (naturally) and hopefully not leave it by New Haw lock. Not that that’s what happened to the last one, of course. No no no, oh deary me no. A big boy took it and ran away with it. Yes, that’s what happened to the last one. *cough*

*The inimitable Trouty, of course!
** Alright, so I don’t work in Marketing. How can you tell?
***No, not that one. Gimme some credit, will ya?

‹Still wants own canal-boat›

I’m so glad I plumped for the driving role of the works team when asked to join the Three Peaks Challenge (the challenge being to climb Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon in less than 24 hours). There’s something about being in the driving seat of a Huge White Van (well, minibus really) that makes you go hurtling about like a loony whilst mountaineers vomit in the back. Smashing!

So, we had two teams (due to a surprise amount of interest, we had too many for just one team!) of idiots that wanted to climb 3 mountains in under 24 hours, starting at Ben Nevis. Well, first we had to get to Ben Nevis, which involved a 9 hour drive from Southampton to Glen Nevis. I was most fortunate to be at the wheel for the 120 mile leg of the journey through the Highlands! Glen Coe is possibly one of the most awe-inspiring places I’ve ever been to on this god-forsaken planet we call home, I’d buy it if I were a proper Laird.

Anyway, we started at 5p.m. (after a safety briefing in the nearby fire-station) and we saw our walkers up to the start line at the foot of Ben Nevis. Then us drivers retired to the mini-buses to prepare pasta and tuna and stored same in a multitude of flasks, for to feed the walkers at about midnight during a driver-swap-stop. 5 hours and much nattering, setting the world to rights and being eaten alive by midges* later, our walkers returned from their triumphant hike up and down Ben Nevis and it was time to hie us hence to Scafell Pike, somewhere in the Lake District.
Lucky me, I got to drive us out of the Highlands as the sun was setting and the moon was rising above misty glens and peeking between great big hills of the looming large variety. My fellow driver tried to take some piccies, with varying degrees of success. These degrees ranged from blinding me with the flash off the inside of the windscreen to capturing the tail-lights of the other minibus in a nice wobbly art nouveau stylee. Ah well. The whole journey through Glen Coe will forever be etched in my mind to the extent that I will be able to happily wander there in my mind whenever the fancy takes me; I just wish I were able to show all you fine folk

So, at about 3:30 a.m. we arrived at the holding point** before Scafell Pike, waited about 30 minutes for our next start time and then hurtled along a very misty lane alongside Wast Water. We knew by our maps that Wast Water was to our right, but had no idea how far down the sheer drop it might be (with no crash barriers, I hasten to add). Dodging rogue sheep along a pot-hole strewn road when you can see about 5 ft in front of you isn’t normally my idea of fun, but I made an exception and maintained my idiot grin all the way to Wasdale Head, where we bid our sleepy walkers adieu yet again. More cooking, this time bacon and sossidge rolls, followed by about 5 minutes sleep*** before our walkers yelled at us via PMR radio to let us know they were about 10 minutes away. Bugger! We just got all the cooking gear packed up as our team returned and leapt (well, stumbled) into the minibuses and demanded (well, mumbled) to be driven to Lanberis so they could go and climb Snowdon. Nutters.

A delightful drive to North Wales and we booted the raving morons out of the minibuses and, in true bus-driver idiom, we went to the nearest pub. Guinness is such a rewarding drink when you’ve been awake for close to 36 hours with only odd little cat-naps here and there. after a drink each, we tossed to see which drivers were to remain sober and which were to carry on drinking. I won! Horrah! A delightful afternoon to sit outside a Welsh pub and sup Guinness, even if I did get a slightly burnt nose.

The walkers finally made it back from Snowdon, and it was then that we learnt the times of the two teams:
Team A 21 hours, 36 minutes Team B 21 hours 0 minutes! Woohoo! Both teams got Silver medals!**** For a moment, I felt like Bobby Moore. Must have been the Guinness. Oh, and the champagne in the car-park.

We wended our weary way to some hotel just off the Menai Bridge on Anglesea, scoffed huge steaks all round and swigged til we dropped. Hoorah again!

Go on then, here are the piccies…

Ben Nevis is the *ahem* little one in the middle…

…and again using digital zoom.

Some hills behind where we parked the minibuses. I placed my prescription sunglasses over the camera lens for this one.

Mike, myself, Gareth and Tony. Chefs extraordinaire and White Van Men to boot.

There’s moutains in there somewhere.

Oh yes…

… there they are…

…lovely, ain’t they?

Sunglasses again.

Bored and playing with the macro setting on my camera. I was accused of being arty-farty, so I turned round rather quickly…

…and took this delightful still-life shot.

This is Wast Water, the 3 mile long lake we nearly drove into in the mist.

Snowdon is one of them, I think. Don’t ask me, I didn’t climb the bloody thing. Djoo think I’m mad or summit?

And to round off nicely, here is a mural on a shop in Lanberis that I fell in love with on the way back from the pub. Yes, I was crouched in the middle of the road for this shot. Yes, I got yelled warnings of impending traffic. No, I didn’t get run over.

*The Midges in Scotland are so tough, the birds fly around in pairs. True Fcat.
** This was to help seperate the teams a bit: driving time is defined as a total of 11 hours, so there’s no point in speeding. The fastest times are achieved by the fastest walkers. The holding point was quite amazing: so many transit vans in one place. Any locals unfortunate enough to witness such an unholy congregation must have been worried about Pikies taking over their land.
***Apparantly it was more like a whole hour, but it felt like 5 minutes. Bah.
**** Bronze = 22 - 24 hrs, Silver = 20 - 22 hrs, Gold = 18 - 20 hrs and Platinum = less than 18 hrs.

‹Starts saving up for a proper digital SLR camera›

I’m back! Whizzo time had by all this weekend, lots of BIG hills + mountains, lovely scenery, good piccies.
Detailed report to follow shortly.
Bed + cuddles required now.

Night!