Lost on the Grand Union Canal

As I mentioned yesterday this weekend is all about camping and like good campers we maximised our enjoyment by staying for a second night; a great decision given how great a morning we woke up to. All the sunshine did make for an early start though and with the sun rising over the valley I set off on a route that I ambitiously hoped would link up the Two Ridges Link walk with the Grand Union Canal and so create an off-road, beautiful, circular experience.

At first things went pretty much to plan - probably because I used Google Street View to preview just as much of the route as I could. What an amazing tool this is and all for free; however did we get along before Google came along and changed our lives? Anyway after a while I started crossing fields and startling sheep but that was okay as the view across the valley made up for any obstacles:

That's a long view and a half

This was rather fortunate because after a little while I startled more than a sheep while edging past what I thought was an abandoned car at the far end of a rutted track - up popped a woman who may have been relieving herself or worse. I didn't hang around to find out! This encounter put a spring in my step though and I was soon well on my way to Slapton or I would have been had the path not been diverted in a way that doesn't yet appear on the map. This thrust a rather large spanner into my mental works and I found myself jogging around an unexpected field; which meant that when I stumbled across the canal I wasn't sure which side I was on.

To cut a long story short I chose badly and ended up heading North - entirely the wrong direction - and being a bloke it took me ages to stop and ask for help. Amusingly the lucky canal dwellers I selected didn't know where they were either (how is that possible?) but we established that if I kept going I would end up in Birmingham and that didn't suit me at all. So I turned around and, more by luck than judgement, I located Ivinghoe Bridge and a way out of the nightmare:

An idyllic country scene

There was, however, a silver lining to this misadventure in that I stumbled across the Ford End watermill while stumbling along the B488 and it looked like an interesting place to visit with the kids. So that's exactly what we did after I'd recovered and we'd spent a happy couple of hours gathering fruit and veg at the local PYO farm; it's almost ironic that children are content to pick fruit in field under the boiling sun when they won't pick up their clothes from the bathroom floor! Oh how this makes us chuckle!

Distance: 11.2 miles

Time: 1h 36m 11s