Arch said:
So, how was the holiday? Did you get wet (and did it rain?)
It did rain, and we did get wet. But only a tiny bit of the wet was not due to the rain.
When we arrived we discovered that it had been raining very very hard in Wales and so the Wye was going really rather fast. We managed to catch up with it and get the boat in, though, and had quite a good time.
The only really serious rain was on our first night camping in the tent (as opposed to in the van), and it only really started after we'd got the tent up and us inside it.
It made the river even faster and higher, though, and we finished the trip in only three and a half days, rather than the five or six we'd reckoned on.
The only bit of wet that wasn't rain was from the rapids at Symonds Yat, which weren't so much rapids as blisteringly fasts, and very choppy with it. Soon solved by sponging out the bottom of the canoe, though.
We started walking the South Downs Way in stages about twelve years ago, when we lived down that way. Progress in more recent years has been glacial, because the South Downs are really rather a long way from Yorkshire. So we used the left-over time to take the van to the South Downs and walk some more bits of it. Another weekend and we'll have it finished; the champagne has been laid down in anitcipation.
We did have a couple of people ask why we needed a canoe on top of the van for walking the South Downs. We referred them to the weather forecast.