the other kind of rambling

We were out this morning with the Gold Duke of Edinburgh group - an absolutely lovely group of young people, who are all incredibly fit, and can all walk the socks off me any time. They set off from the mini bus this morning, chattering their heads off, striding confidently into the distance, and were out of sight in minutes. Handsome and I followed at a distance, and caught up when we could. In my case, that was when they stopped. Thankfully I was only doing the first third, so I got to recover in the mini bus. One of our colleagues did the second part, and Handsome did the last leg on his own.

The group had done all the planning for the route today, all we had told them was where they would start and finish (because of mini buses), and how many kilometres they had to walk. They tagged together all sorts of bits of other walks and then added on bits, seemingly at random. After one or two false starts (we wouldn't let them cross farm land or walk several ks up a main road) they did come up with a viable route.

Unfortunately it took them longer than anticipated - some of their planning was a bit out time wise, and they'd planned their route with a big hill near the end, and the last bit was unpleasantly marshy (I'm really glad I didn't do that bit, I hate bogs), so they were more than an hour past time, and it was dark before we were home. Poor Handsome had to walk the last bit feeling extremely unwell, and he was definitely more than a little grumpy by the time he got back.