Friday 27 December 2013

Playing With New Technology

Hopefully, if I have any idea of how this gadget works, this should be the first post using our new tablet. Eventually, we hope this will allow us to blog on the go, which will be very useful especially on longer trips.
 
Anyway, Boxing morning in Usk was bright and sunny and not too cold, as can be seen from the accompanying photo. So we went for a brisk six-miler to walk off the Christmas dinner and build up an appetite of sorts. A beautiful morning, and well worth the effort!
 

Tuesday 24 December 2013

An Odd End To The Year

Quite unintentionally, and to my detriment, it’s been a blog-free end to the year. I hadn’t intended for things to tail off as they have done, but you don’t always get a choice in the way things pan out. Stuff happens: you deal with it, you move on. 

However, I didn’t want to sign off for 2013 without wishing all readers, regular and otherwise, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! And, for those of you who blog yourselves, I promise I’ll try to catch up with all your missives over the festive break.
Anyway normal service (or what passes for it!) will be resumed again next year. In fact, rumour has it that Santa might be delivering a shiny new tablet, so Ambles & Rambles may be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era at last! Blogging on the go: now there’s a thought to conjure with, and I’m looking forward to testing it out before trying it in earnest during the bigger trips of next year.
 
I’ll round up the end of year stats early in January, as we’re hoping to clock up a few miles over the Christmas break. However, we’ve had a great year, and set a new annual record into the bargain - now that can't be bad, whichever way you look at it!
 
Before I sign off, I’ve just time to report a bit of weirdness. We were out walking yesterday, when – quite out of the blue, and a propos of nothing at all – I wondered out loud what our cumulative mileage might be for all the years since 2005 (the year we started regularly logging our walking stats). Despite recording our annual total, this cumulative count was something we hadn’t checked before. A quick bit of mental arithmetic had me guesstimating we might soon be approaching the 6,000 mile mark, a landmark it would surely be worth celebrating when the time came.
 
When we got home, we added our day’s mileage to the annual total, and added our annual totals together, and – you know what’s coming here, don’t you? – found we had actually passed the 6,000 mile mark during that very walk, round about the precise time it occurred to me to check.
 
Spooky, or what?
 
I’m no advocate of the paranormal – rather, I’m inclined to the opposite view, allowing pesky things like facts and evidence to get in the way of a decent  “unexplained” event – but it was an unusual coincidence, if coincidence it was!