Things fall apart

For some time now my walks with Joe and Georgie have lasted no more than two hours, sometimes only ninety minutes. It’s the weather. Yesterday we did a marathon.

Nearly three hours. 

The main goal was to visit a crazy tree we discovered last year.

A now well established tree that took root however long ago in a ten-foot stump. When the stump was no longer able to provide nutrition, the tree sent out roots around it. As I said, crazy.

It turned into a sort of greatest hits walk. Witchdoctor Way past the capped stump and “Wildlife” tree. 

A wander through the alders to see if the owl was still there.

It was.

Said hello to the “hugging” trees.

Which, oddly, we first discovered on Valentine’s Day two years ago.

Wandered through the field of “ghost” trees.

This photo really does not convey how much it looks like someone dumped Agent Orange in here. What on earth killed them all?

One new discovery was this shiny object.

On closer inspection, it turned out to be a magnet covered in what Joe guessed were air pellets. When he leaned in to take his own photo, Georgie insisted on being in on the action.

This very large woods is a place I’d never visited before Joe and I started our Covid walks in 2020. I’d read too many stories in the local paper about people getting lost in there. Turns out the sign posting had been considerably improved since the days when those stories were appearing. Still, I wouldn’t venture in there without Joe (or someone else who really knows his or her way around. Getting lost is still a possibility. Just last year there was a report about a woman who’d ended up spending the night there with her dog after a wrong turn on an evening walk. (It was whilst investigating the side trail where she’d spent the night that we stumbled across the crazy tree above.) 

Turns out even an old pro like Joe can take a wrong turn. Which is how what would have been a two and a half hour walk turned into a three hour walk. This would have been fine (heaven knows I could do with burning off a few more calories) if it hadn’t been for the fact that about ten minutes into the extra half hour I suddenly developed a pain/ache at the right side of my right knee. When you get into your sixties this sort of thing is immediately assumed to be the beginning of the end. And it was the beginning. A few minutes later there was a pain/ache on the left side of my right ankle. Oh, great. Then there was a pain/ache at the back of my right hip. By the time we made it to the main trail back to the cars I had some “good” news to share with Joe: By then the hip pain was bad enough that I barely noticed the knee and ankle discomfort. Fuck me, I thought, things really do fall apart.

This morning there is some actual good news. All aches and pains gone. Mind you, the furthest I’ve walked so far today is from the bed to the kitchen and back to the computer. We shall see. Let’s hope, as Joe suggested, that it was simply the fact that we’d been walking for an hour more than we have in recent months. Let’s hope this isn’t actually the beginning of the end.