Winter Adventures

We have started this Winter with lots of days out enjoying the beautiful countryside we get to call home.  My husband was off work for 12 days over the Christmas and New Year period which gave us lots of time to have some great days out.

We got the canoes out for a trip around a local lake.  I love canoeing, especially as a family, but we don't manage it that often as the only day we can all go is on a Sunday.  I very often need the time on this day to get myself ready for the week ahead or do those jobs that there is not the time for during the week.  It was a grey day in the main with welcome odd sightings of the sun and enough wind to get the little sail out for the journey back to the car.  We were the only boats out and about, apart from the steamers taking folks out for trips around the lake.

Our friends who live in Scotland were down for a few days just before Christmas, we managed to spend the day with them and another family on a walk alongside a different lake.  We were so lucky that that it was another dry day with patches of sunshine.

Whenever we are at home for Christmas we go for a walk on Christmas Day.  We have kedgeree for breakfast which is really filling, we take snacks with us, there is no need for a picnic.  This walk is very near to where we live, the hills in these pictures are the view from my house.  The small amount of water in the middle photo is a reservoir that was built to supply water to Manchester about 100 miles away, it flooded the valley covering a small village, when we have a really dry summer and the water level drops you can see remnants of walls and buildings.  The water travels underground in a pipeline which is feat of engineering you can read more about it here.

My mountain bike was dusted off and taken out the garage for a rare outing.  I am not a massive fan of mountain biking I prefer to ride on roads.  My husband and Cameron go mountain biking regularly and love it when Alice and I join them.  We weren't riding together though as Alice and I opted for the wide open forest tracks whilst Husband and Cameron were on a purpose built mountain biking route that had no appeal for us!

Alice enjoyed our dusk walk on the Winter Solstice so much that she asked if we could do it again only this time staying out until it was properly dark.  We headed out at about 2 o'clock when most folks were heading back to their cars.  It was a wild and windy day with good views from vantage points, we were rewarded with a beautiful sunset and the thinest sliver of a newish moon.  It is something we are going to do again whilst the evenings are still dark fairly early.

We had plans to go for a big walk with friends on New Years Eve.  They challenged us to take them somewhere new, to them, so we opted for a ridge that my husband drives past on this way to work every day.  It was a glorious day, big wide blue skies with the odd fluffy cloud, once we got up on the ridge we could see for miles and had a 360° view.  We saw one other walker in the six hours we were out walking.  We covered 13km/8 miles mostly off paths and through some very wet boggy places in parts.  As we walked down off the ridge the sun dropped down behind the hills and it got very cold indeed.  We followed our walk with an evening meal at our house, seeing in the New Year with a glass of champagne and some inspired dancing and singing to Auld Lang Syne!

We haven't been on quite so many adventures since then but I have realised that at this time of year if you don't plan to go out you will never do it, you have probably worked that out already.  If we were to wait for the weather to be fair then we would definitely never leave the house.  We are planning on having a day out a week doing something, whatever the weather, throughout the Winter.  We have the clothing and equipment to cope with cold, wet days  and I have heard it quoted often there is no such thing as bad weather only the unsuitable or wrong clothing we don't have any excuses.  So Winter here we come!

Have you had any fun adventures yet this Winter?