Back where we belong.

Not the most auspicious of starts to a holiday 😆 The way down to Devon was dogged by bad traffic and the journey took much longer than normal. Fortunately, *she says, getting the plug in early* Three had lent us a Mifi Mobile Broadband doodah which meant iPhone and iPods could have a decent connection throughout the journey, which alleviated some of the stress and meant I could keep my eye on the traffic news and make sure we did wee stops before the next big jam 😆

We arrived at Lower Hookner the next day, after a night stop with Max’s brother, where the girls did masses of Pokemon style drawing. The stop was not without its drama, but that’s a blog post of its own 🙂 The farm was its normal welcoming self, we were very pleased to find out that Mrs White Duck got all five of her surviving ducklings (out of 7) through to adulthood. May this be an omen please 🙂

The next day we headed off for a walk. We’d not really thought about the bank holiday but were perturbed to discover we had to share Dartmoor with OTHER PEOPLE. Gah! Luckily Max knows secret haunts and less busy car parks and we found ourselves near Kitty Jay’s grave, a particularly haunting Dartmoor legend of an unmarried mother. Max took me to see her the first time we ever went to Dartmoor together and I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the story. Of course the girls staggered between various bits of moral outrage over the whole thing, while Josie simply maintained that unless you are Auntie Greer, you have to be married to have babies 😆 Anyway, PSHE while out for a walk; can’t beat home ed 🙂

We followed this up with a pretty perfect starter walk over to Bowerman’s Nose. They REALLY liked this story and, once they’d climbed over to the man himself (I had a sit down!) Maddy wove a story which they all acted out and released Bowerman from the curse for good and all. It was a great story, I’ll have to get her to dictate it to me.

I was happy to admire the closer pleasures of the gorse and heather…

while definitely not reading emails and Twitter with the Mifi connection. No, not at all. Definitely not.

Monday we did a long, looping and towards the end a little arduous for a person with less pelvic muscles that normal, walk from Manaton to Foxworthy. It was a LOVELY walk but I was very glad that it ended at the Kestor Inn, the stuff of one of our own personal legends, where we had ice cream while Max went to get the car. Actually, we spent a fair bit of the week telling the girls stories of ‘before them’ last week – it was funny. This particular story related to a very hot 3 day walk Max and I did once where, having finally got to Manaton, I flatly refused to go any further. At all. Ever. We weregvery poor then, a taxi back to Chagford was not an option, but luckily the ONE BUS OF THE WEEK turned out to be due to pass in a hour 😆

However, this time the walk mainly involved impressive beetles…

…and precarious perches.

I might have to move to a nice house I saw in Foxworthy though. Well, actually, I’ll just set up camp by the river. SO beautiful.

I ran out of energy. More holiday to follow 🙂