Hartshill Hayes Park, Warwickshire. 26th May 2007

As it is supposedly going to be the last dry day for a while we decided to go for a walk. We drove to Hartshill Hayes Park in Warwickshire. We don’t often venture into Warwickshire but it was actually quite a short drive. We parked at the Country Park and then walked through some lovely woodland. Unfortunately we were on the wrong path and didn’t find out until we got to the end of the woods where we had to turn round and retrace our steps. It did give us chance to listen to the birds though. The bluebells have finally finished here but there were plenty of other wild flowers about and the smell of wild garlic was everywhere. We followed the correct path this time and crossed a road to the Coventry Canal.

This was very busy today with lots of colourful barges travelling up-stream. There were lots of birds on the canal including Mallards with a family of tiny ducklings and some swans sitting on their nest.

We walked on the towpath for about 2 miles and then left it to walk through the woodland of Purley Park, past a farm growing bedding plants and finally across a golf-course! We re-entered Hartshill Hayes Country Park and enjoyed views across Warwickshire and Leicestershire before returning to the car.

Hathersage, Derbyshire. 23rd May 2007

We drove to Hathersage in the Peak District today to do a short 6 mile walk onto Stannage edge. It was nice and sunny but a bit breezy up on the edge. We started by walking to Hathersage church-the burial place of Little John.

We walked past Moorside Hall the home of the Eyres and supposedly where Jane Eyre was born and then climbed steeply through some woods - it was nice to see the bluebells were still out.

It was quite a steep climb and we struggled a bit as we are still recovering from our nasty colds. We finally climbed onto Stannage edge which was covered in climbers and where John saw a Ring Ouzel! We walked along the top in the sunshine and then made our way back off the edge and down through woodland and past the house which inspired Thornfield where Mr Rochester lived. We finally returned to Hathersage where we found that our favourite tea shop had closed and we had to make do with the café over the Outside shop.

Pittsburgh, USA 5th May 2007

A break from our normal walking update as we travelled to the USA for a conference. After the non-arrival of our hire car - they had delivered it to the wrong village, we set off for Gatwick at 4am on Saturday morning. We cleared security and boarded the plane for the long flight. 7 hours 40 minutes on a plane is very boring! The plane was late landing and immigration at Newark took ages which meant we missed our connecting flight to Pittsburgh. US airways found us another flight and we finally got to our hotel at 8.30pm (ET).

First impressions of Pittsburgh is that it is a very clean city. 30 years ago it was very polluted with smoke from the steel mills but now it is a business city with a fantastic skyline. The city is sandwiched between 3 rivers and has over 400 bridges. The skyscrapers were very impressive especially the Pittsburgh Plate Glass building which was based on the Houses of Parliament.
I attended the conference for three days which included an evening trip on a Clipper boat to the Carnegie Science Museum.

We then had 2 days to explore on our own. Downtown Pittsburgh is mainly a business district and we discovered that there were very few shops except for places for the workers to get their lunches, we did spend some time exploring Macy's department store though.

On Thursday we used the Duquesne incline to travel up to Mount Washington for a stroll. This is a very nice housing district. while we were up the top there was a fly past by Marine 1 carrying President Bush to a graduation ceremony in Pittsburgh.

We also went on a Duckie Tour - a WWII amphibious boat which gives tours through Downtown Pittsburgh and then down the Monagahele River. It was an amusing commentary especially when they found out we were from England and that it had now become an International tour with Duty Free to be sold on the river!

On our last day we took a walk over to the North Shore and walked along the river bank to view the memorials to the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The Vietnam memorial is actually a Lotus flower, symbol of Peace and not a pineapple as we thought as it is situated outside the Del Monte building! We finished off with a walk to the Strip where we had an ice-cream sundae in an authentic 1930's ice-cream parlour.

We left Pittsburgh at 12pm ET, to catch our flight to Newark at 4pm. However, this was delayed until 5.45pm which meant that we would have missed our flight to Gatwick. US airways managed to reroute us so that we caught a flight to Philadelphia and then from there to Gatwick. The return flight did not seem so bad, mainly because it was overnight and we managed to get a few hours sleep. We landed at Gatwick at 9.15 GMT.