Escambray Mountains - Cuba 23 February - 3 March 2008

Having had the most brilliant time during our Breast Cancer Care charity trek in China in April 2007 we decided to carry on raising money for this fantastic charity and take part in another overseas challenge in Cuba.  Raising money for charity is often difficult but most of the time we had such fun doing it.  Over the years (spanning from 2006 to 2012) we raised around £43,000, in a number of ways such as fancy dress discos, a "Full Length and Fabulous" ball, organising our own charity walks in the Coquet Valley and along the fabulous Northumberland coast as well has having a stall at a local town fayre.   

Halloween Fancy Dress Disco

Dufton to High Cup Nick 14 March 2014 - the continuing story .......

I hope you've had time to read my previous post about the recce we did at Dufton in preparation for our walk this weekend to High Cup Nick - this is an account of the whole walk and boy what a walk! We chose a route from the internet which was supposed to be around 8.5 miles but because of my achilles tendon injury the recce we did the previously was to find a place to start the walk a bit further along the route in order to shorten it by a few miles.  

The start of our walk

The weather forecast was good for the day with light winds but it was very cold and icy and we could see snow on higher ground so we wrapped up well and made sure we all had a flask of something hot to drink for lunch later. We arrived at our parking place around 10 am and set off in high spirits.  

Dufton - A nice 3 mile bimble - 8 March 2015

The 1st of March was the opening date of Whitegate Caravan Park where we own a lovely caravan holiday home so at the first opportunity we winged it down the A1 and over the A66 for a weekend in paradise. We just love this place, and it's our second home but we're still not too familiar with the area and still finding our way around. The walking around here is just brilliant and relatively people free which is just fine by us.  

We're expecting visitors here next weekend and are walking from Dufton to High Cup Nick so today we decided to go check out where we were going to start the walk from and have a nice, short bimble just to stretch the legs.  Plus, Heidi hasn't been too well this last week so although she looks like she has loads of energy we didn't want to overdo it so thought a nice 3 mileish walk would be just perfect.

Signposts everywhere making the route to High Cup Nick easy to find

The weather was great only raining once for about 5 minutes and we had perfect views showing us exactly what the walking is like around this area.

Newlands Horseshoe - 16 August 2010

My BFF, Brenda, and her partner Paul meet up every year for a week's walking with old school friends of Paul.  In August 2010 they were meeting in and around Keswick and we got an invite too which we accepted although we could only stay a few days.  This was before the days of having Heidi so you'll notice no dogs on the photos.

We had never met any of the group before and on the Saturday we all met in a pub in Keswick to plan the following week's walks and they soon made me and the Hubster feel very welcome, as if we'd known them for years. 

The first walk we did on the Sunday was a nice short one up Latrigg, just to get the limbs moving a bit and on the Monday we were to meet at small parking area near a bridge just past Little Town to do the Newlands Horseshoe.  Brenda found the walk in one of our walking books and apart from missing out one Wainright (Hindscarth) we followed the instructions and had the most fantastic walk we'd ever been on. 

Our first "stop to look at the view" break haha

I WILL walk 1000 miles this year!

I decided in January that I was going to get off my fat, lazy posterior and do more walking as I'd read a post on the Country Walking facebook page about taking a challenge this year and their suggestion was to walk 1000 miles between 1 January and 31 December 2015.  With that in mind I set up my own "Walk 1000 miles in 2015" facebook page and invited all my facebook friends to join me.

As we all know not everyone likes walking but a number of my friends decided to join me in this challenge and others that don't walk are supporting us by following our posts on the page. There are people in our group from all over the country - Leeds and London are two examples, and we're all cracking on and building up our totals.