How to get lost on the West Pennine Moors

England, October 2010.

Step One

Go to Lancashire. Various other parts of England will do just as well, I daresay, but this one I can vouch for from experience.

Select a small, godforsaken town or village that most people have never heard of. You can choose one with an impossible name to pronounce (plenty of those in Wales, of course, unless you’re born-and-bred Welsh), or any other seemingly plain, innocuous place. Do not use a GPS /SatNav – that would be cheating. Or not. I was actually told by my hostess, Jenny, how previous visitors, as well as the Royal Mail, got discombobulated because their sophisticated navigation device got it wrong. Let’s say you’ve chosen the unquaint town of Chorley. (Any Monty Python fan may choose Notlob instead.)

Step Two

Ignore town center. Drive out of  town to its outermost limits, to places like Heath Charnock, where the lanes are narrow, the green pastures and water reservoirs plentiful, there are more horses on said lanes than bicycles, and the actual residential houses are at least a kilometer apart. Back Lane would be a good point of departure. To ascertain that you are still in Civilization, make sure that there’s a pub in the vicinity. Say one called the Yew Tree.

Step Three

Pick a direction. Any direction. So long  as it’s away from the Yew Tree and the cottages along Back Lane, away from town, and preferably not leading  straight into a water reservoir, as that would be counter-productive.

Walk briskly  to counteract the chill and work up a moderate sweat. Cross a bridge or two. Follow a more-or-less beaten track. Keep an eye out for small gates or stiles with the innocent looking sign Public Footpath. Climb over stile, find yourself on soggy grass and convince yourself that this is what a Public Footpath indeed must look like.

Step Four

Do not let the sheep, cows, flies, sheep dung and other natural aspects of the scenery put you off. Just because you happen to be wending your way among them does not mean that you have any less of a right to be in the midst of that soggy meadow. The sign did say Public footpath, did it not? Okay, so the path is a bit hidden among the green thingies and brownish mounds… and the public seems to be mostly composed of the bovine and ovine type. So what. Carry on in a true sporting spirit through another gate, fence or stile, to a similar pasture, until there is nothing around you but Nature and its creatures.

There, you have arrived!

You are thoroughly lost on the West Pennine Moors!

Wasn’t that fun? Didn’t that imbue you with a true, countryside sense of accomplishment? No? It did not? You want to go home? To the safety of the Yew Tree? Well, I hope you remembered to bring along your cellphone! Call your host and try to describe exactly where you are. Though that may prove to be a bit difficult, what with one meadow looking pretty much like the next…

Ah, wait, there’s a tall white wind-turbine to your, er, north-west… or is it to your east? No matter – it’s the only wind turbine within miles. You’re in luck.

We got back safely to Rose Cottage on Back Lane.

The only casualties were my no-longer-black boots.

I don’t think I shall ever wear them again.

But look at the bright side – there’s a sale at Clarks!

How to choose pictures of your trip for your blog

Our next trip is approaching, and I never finished writing about the previous one…
Each time I look at the hundreds of pics we took and try to decide which one/s are worth expounding about, I feel faint. And that's after we reduced the collection from over a thousand to a mere six hundred.

Of course, when two people do the sorting, compromises must be made. "No way we keep this horrid picture of me!!! I look fat!" says one of us, guess who. "Okay, but if we delete that one, we also delete the one of me where I'm pulling a face," goes the counter-offer. "Be my guest, but I'm for deleting this brown spot." "It's not a brown spot, it's a bear!" And so it goes.

Photos carry memories, but writing about them can easily become tedious. You know, like in the bad old days when you were invited to friends to see the slides from their trip or from their son's bar-mitzvah/graduation/wedding:
"Ooh, here we are at the castle [which? What? Where?], you remember? The one with the tea parlor where the tea was lousy and the waitress was rude?"
"Ah, here's Auntie Rose! Doesn't she look great?" [Who's auntie rose? Who cares?]

Nowadays you get a link by email which you can "accidentally" delete, or follow and just skim through in a few minutes. You choose one pic at random, comment on it or click "Like" on Facebook, et voila – you've fulfilled your social obligations. The rest of the digital photos will continue to snooze safely(?) on some faraway server, at least until the next solar flare wipes the slate(?) clean.

Back to sorting photos and the dilemmas involved.

Take the Grand Canyon, for example.
First of all, I didn't realize it's a whole Industry. In my innocent imagination, I thought you parked your car in a dirt parking lot, walked over a few meters to a sort of rail or fence, and looked down and beyond at the Canyon. Since the canyon is long, tourists could spread out along its length… You look, ooh and ahh, take pictures, and that's it.
Maybe it used to be like that, more or less, scores of years ago. But for quite a while now it has been practically a Country with big Commercial Centers and a Transportation System.

In the evening, we went – with droves of other tourists – to Yavapai Point, to watch the sunset. It was beautiful. The sky changes from blue to pink to lilac to to orange-red to dark mauve… But how many of those two-dozen photos do you end up uploading onto your fave website?... Just for you, I struggled and chose one:

 As for the canyon itself, my amateur pictures simply cannot do it justice, no matter how hard I tried and how many pictures I took. Cousin Bonnie, a more experienced photographer who fiddles with the light, contrast and focus settings, achieved better results. Still, you have to be a National Geographic photographer, with fancy equipment, possibly including a helicopter and a space shuttle, to capture it in all its glory.


Here's one pic of the canyon:
If you look carefully, you'll actually see the water at the bottom of the canyon. 

"I swear I don't have such a big belly – it's the T-shirt!":

"Can't you see it's a bear?!":

Next stop: Wahweap, Lake Powel and Glen Canyon.