Lonewalker's Journal on Walking Places

I've had a website of sorts on Walking Places for a couple of years now and so far it's been quite a static affair, updated every few months when I've completed a long distance path, or the planning for a future long distance walk.

I would like to make this latest incarnation of the website a little more dynamic and start to include more frequently updated material. This may include gear reviews, day walks I have recently completed and other thoughts I've had.

If you continue to read these pages I hope you enjoy them and find something of interest among them. By all means let me know what you think, there are links to my email address at the bottom of each article. 

Posted on 21st February 2008, by Lonewalker

A Word About Pictures On This Site

Many of the pictures on this site are small thumbnail images, which when you hover your mouse over them will expand to full size without the need to click on them. This does mean that some pages take slightly longer to load than usual, simply because the browser is loading both the thumbnail image and the full-size image when the page opens.

When you want to close the picture, just move your mouse away from the popup image and it will disappear. Give it a try on the small version to the left.

I have tested the system on Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, at screen resolutions of 1024x768 upwards, without any problems. However, if you experience any problems with these images then please drop me an email. Including details of your browser and screen resolution.

Posted on 21st February 2008, by Lonewalker

A Little Bit About Me

When I think about it, I actually feel quite deprived. I only discovered the joys of the outdoors in my 40's, many years beyond what most people would agree is my prime. My parents took us on day trips to places I now consider prime walking areas like the Peak District and North Wales, but we never ventured far from the car and although we were all quite trim and fit, it never crossed our minds to walk any further than we needed to.

I joined the cubs for a short period, but like many of the activities undertaken in my formative years, including the trombone and the air cadets, the cubs lasted only a few short weeks before I was bored and dropped out. This meant I never went on any of the camping or hiking expeditions that people of my age did at the time. I'm not sure I would have appreciated them at the time either. Although many of my friends spoke excitedly on a Monday morning in school of walks they had enjoyed across Kinder Scout and Mam Tor the previous weekend. I just thought "daft sods, fancy tramping across hills all weekend when you could be enjoying yourself".

All this inactivity, however, inevitably led to middle age spread. My sporting activities may have included a good deal of local league football, in which I excelled, but the social side of the game (i.e. post match drinks and post training drinks) more than made up for any benefit the exercise may have been doing me. Mid-week I was to be found playing snooker, another "sport" that was surrounded by a healthy drinking culture. Long before the responsibilities of a mortgage and a job enforced an early night and sober outlook, I would be spending anything up to 16 hours at a time in the snooker hall playing "a pint a game, best of 19".

College turned an "amateur" drinking habit into an almost full-time professional one. I was not an alcoholic by any means, but I don't suppose that I went more than 24 hours in those three years at Preston Polytechnic without a drink of some kind or another. The drinking abated significantly once I was married, but was quickly replaced by food as Christine carried out what she felt were her wifely duties by having my tea on the table promptly each evening.

By the time I reached 40, I was about 25 stone and well on the way to diabetes, coronary heart disease and all sorts of other wonderful weigh-related illnesses. My three children were nearly all grown, the youngest was 13, the oldest 18 and I decided that if I ever were to see my grandchildren I better start to do something to turn my life around. The real catalyst for this was a photo my Mum took at my 40th birthday party. Read more...