The Road goes ever on and on; Down from the door where it began;
Now far ahead the Road has gone; And I must follow, if I can;
Pursuing it with eager feet; Until it joins some larger way;
Where many paths and errands met; And whither then? I cannot say.

[JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings]

Saturday 17 November 2012

Planning

Once a year Mick & I go and spend a chunk of time in the library, poring over maps and books. Today was the day for this year’s trip, and a fruitful few hours were spent there. The result was that we settled on a rough plan for a route across Scotland for next May.

library

That desk looks far too organised, doesn’t it?

All we need to do now is put the detail around that rough plan and fill in a route sheet.

Also on the subject of the Challenge, there was going to be another blog post tonight, full of Very Interesting Graphs. Alas, the draft post was lost due to stupidity (when asked the question ‘Do you want to save’, I really should stop to think before I press ‘No’. I did the same thing at work three times in three weeks). I shall try again tomorrow.

4 comments:

  1. Far, far too organised! Looks like you know what you are doing. My maps looked beautiful until I took them off the shelves. Then they all spilled out of their covers because some vandal has been at them. Arrgggh!!
    Start point? Go on, give us a clue. Pretty please?

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  2. You should have seen the state of that desk half an hour later. There was many a whisper of 'Where's number 35 gone?'. I suppose it's an advantage of the library that all of the covers are attached. All of our maps at home are loose inside of their covers.

    As for our start point, the current plan is Acharacle. I planned a route from there in 2010, but decided that I didn't like it. Having considered a number of other start points for this year, we revisited and improved the Acharacle route. Much tweaking will now be done (the problem with the library is that it's really warm, and it's too easy when sitting in a warm room to believe that 100 miles of lumpy, boggy, pathless yomping will be no problem next May).

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  3. Ha ha! I have quite a few planned routes from different starts that are in the 'Possibles' folder and I've now revisited and tweaked three of them. I don't think our paths will cross before Montrose unless you're going to Braemar and that is assuming you're not finishing and disappearing to buy a house and go on a long walk abroad again.
    It's exciting isn't it? I love this bit.

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  4. Braemar does feature on our route as it currently stands and (barring sudden and unexpected house purchases combined with impulsive overseas plans) we will be sticking around for the Thursday dinner in Montrose. No idea yet what day we'll be in Braemar. I feel a spreadsheet coming on...

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