On the off chance, yesterday I phoned my long-time walking pal Mel to see if he fancied a stroll, and I caught him just after he arrived home from a Caribbean cruise. Having spent more than a week eating vast quantities, in the company of vast Americans, he was ready to burn a few calories, but, like me, he was anxious to avoid mud. We decided upon a sea wall walk, out-and-back, from Heybridge Basin to Goldhanger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mel arrived at my house at about 10am and we started walking shortly after 11am. Mel had a 4pm appointment meeting a man in a car park about a ticket for a Tottenham Hotspur match, so with this seemingly dodgy mission in mind, we knew we had a deadline. We set off at a fair old pace in the cool, murky conditions that seem to have dominated the proceedings for far too long, which came as a shock to the jet-lagged Mel, who has become accustomed to a West Indian spring. We stopped at one of the \u201cTiptree Jams\u201d tea room for a cuppa, but didn\u2019t consume any solids, and then hurried on towards the Chequers pub, where Mel had the steak pie and I had the balti. We each enjoyed a pint of Woodfordes Wherry, a very tasty ale from darkest Norfolk. Thereafter we headed straight back, completing about 9.5 miles in under 4 hours, stops included.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wildlife seen: 1 weasel, 1 marsh harrier, quite a lot of brent geese (shouldn\u2019t they be in Siberia?) and a few waders. I didn\u2019t take any photos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the off chance, yesterday I phoned my long-time walking pal Mel to see if he fancied a stroll, and I caught him just after he arrived home from a Caribbean cruise. Having spent more than a week eating vast quantities, in the company of vast Americans, he was ready to burn a few calories, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essex","category-walking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":672,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions\/672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gentlemancyclist.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}