Unravled

My local knitting group was planning a roadtrip to a Unravled, a fibre-themed shopping weekend in nearby Farnham.  I dragged my heels....I don't need more yarn!....but hanging out with the ladies and chatting with the vendors and petting yarn is always fun, so eventually I relented.

Rather fortuitously, I lost my debit card a few days before the festival.  Between Sainsbury's and home it jumped ship, never to be seen again.  What luck!  Now I can't buy anything!   I don't think I'd ever been so giddy about waiting 4 days to get my bank card replaced.  I'd also like to take this opportunity to tell the world about the suckfest that is HSBC banking, as eventually, they sent me a card but it was a copy of the canceled one, so when I activated it and tried to use it, it was rejected and flagged as someone trying to use a stolen card.  How was I allowed to even activate that?  And when they sent me a proper new card, the chip malfunctions so I can't actually use it to pay for things in real life.  I guess when you are spending all your time helping the ultra wealthy avoid paying their taxes, you don't have a lot of time for the pleebs and their filthy issues.  

Anyway.  Unraveled.  With a car load of knitters giddy with potential purchase power, we headed to the 'burbs to Farnham Maltings, a lovely arts centre.  If I lived in Farnham, I would be here all the time- they seem to have loads of interesting events  and films.

The halls were pleasantly packed with really quality vendors of all types.

As kind of a cute thing, they had tags that people could write why they knit, and they hung them all over the place.  Unfortunately, the first one my friend and I saw said this:

Christ on a bike, really?  Also, lots of people wrote "so I don't kill people", and to see that handwritten made it seem like a threat and had us watching each others' backs for the afternoon.

There were lots of local indie yarn sellers- some had cult followings, and almost all of them were new to me.

I managed to snag a few carefully selected and fawned over skeins (and still have enough to get by for the week while I wait for my debt card to arrive) but I saw so much that I thought should come home with me.  Yarn is the new puppy dogs.

I have to explain when I say "retail therapy", I generally don't mean shoes and bags and frocks, but the raw materials to make socks and bags and frocks.  It's totally different.

But ah, the colors, the wool, the parade of knitwear fashion going by.  It was lovely to get out.  A perfect antidote for the February blahs (and appropriately, it was pouring rain out), a bit of retail therapy and a chatty good time.

NDW Day 5: Oxted to Otford

With the gorgeous spring, the brilliant summer and the sun cream laden autumn, I thought winter hiking would be a breeze.  A little colder perhaps, with shorter days, but how could it be any different?  I looked forward to some brusque and chilly walks.

Not so?

I crossed the M25 and headed up the hills of Oxted Downs to find the trail a bog.

I hadn't thought of this.  I mean, it has rained quite a bit off and on but there have been lovely sunny afternoons, but with the dim presence of the sun so low on the horizon, there is no way for all the water to dry up.

It made for exhausting hiking.

When I wasn't hopping over puddles, my boots became so heavy with caked-on mud that I started to think of them as cement shoes.  Plus, every step you took you slipped back a bit, meaning there was a lot of extra effort involved.  Ten miles soon began to feel like 20 at the end of the day, and I really feel like I earned anything I chose to consume when I was safely back in the SW9.

No matter though- the grass is still blindingly green, the trail devoid of humanoids, and the motorway still humming a tune to keep you company.  Also, I feel perfectly safe walking it on my own.

What was special about this day was the crossover from the county of Surrey into Kent.  A milestone of sorts on an otherwise unremarkable day of hillwalking.

Oh, yes.  I've gotten very lazy about carrying my big DSLR on these jaunts, as nothing has been striking me as notable and picturesque.  Green fields, rolling hills and a motorway.  Sometimes I see green woodpeckers, and always kestrels and buzzards.  Pics taken on the celly just aren't as good.  I think maybe the iphone has better optics than the Galaxy 5, which does take remarkably good macro shots, but really rubbish in the great outdoors.

I will finish this trail eventually.  It's always surprisingly pleasant to be strolling on, but just not stunning the way the Highlands of Scotland might be.

oh yes, special effects makes shitty pictures so much better.

Hampton Court Palace

The sunlight now is fleeting.  I try and make the most of it.  

At least the dark, damp days means I've been staying closer to home.  It's hard to hike or justify a trip out of the city when you'll be seeing nothing but inky darkness for the lot of it.  Time to catch up on movies and see what's been happening in London while I was out becoming a hill-person.  

I took a trip out to Hampton Court Palace.  Looking back on the past year, I decided it needed a bit of royal infusion and I searched for an appropriate palatial fix.  Hampton Court Palace in Surrey fit the bill nicely. 

It's not that far out of London and right on the Thames, meaning I could knock another section of the Thames path.

The storied history of the palace fills books.  The money embezzled by Cardinal Woolsey kicked off the building of this imposing mansion.  Once he fell out of favor, it was "gifted" to Henry VIII, who utilized it for his court.  It was passed down to the Stuarts, and Queen Anne took it upon herself to build an elegant addition, and then it became the main home of the Hanoverian kings.

A lot of my local friends told me they hadn't been since grade school- apparently this is very popular with school trips.  There was quite a production of people in Tudor dress and elegant Georgian getups.  

And really.  This was one of the more fantastic palaces I've ever visited.  The Georgian wing rivaled Versailles as far as a gilded casa, and they had lots of information to share.

Oh, and costumes!  You can dress up to get into the spirit.

For its size and status, I don't think this was huge on the tourist hit-list.  Yeah, there were people there, but it wasn't crowded at all, and I was able to take a leisurely stroll through each wing unhurried and unharried.  

The best thing I learned:

The Tudor dining hall was most impressive.

The most interesting bit was the nearby Tudor kitchens and wine cellars.  To feed the court was a production, and the king would have to move from castle to castle based on the fact that his court would have stripped the countryside of bare of anything edible if they stuck around too long.

This was the "refrigerator", a narrow and shady corridor that kept cold year-round...and it was wintry for a minute....

But the kitchens were truly spectacular, with loads of research into the vessels and methods of the tudor court cooks.  The rich meat-heavy diet was a recipe for gout that was so prevalent in the upper classes.  Just because you can afford to eat like a king doesn't mean you should.  

Oh, and I learned all about pies.  Originally, pies were just a cooking vessel as they didn't really have proper cookware for them.  It was a dough made from flour and water, and filled with meat and stew.  You didn't eat the crust- you unlidded it ate ate the good stuff and threw away the rest.

The later wings of the palace were much more elegant and Georgian in style.  But ah, the gardens....

In the waning afternoon light, I took a relaxed autumnal stroll through the rather famous hedge maze, took a peek at the original REAL tennis court.

You can pay membership and play on the same court that Henry VIII showed his prowess.  Although...you have to serve off the wall and there seemed to be some other interesting rules.

Outside the garden gates, there is a deer park- a holdover for when the King would go out hunting in the nearby countryside.

I walked through the park and connected back to the Thames, and took a long meandering walk back to the train station.

Some wild-growing hops did not go unnoticed or unpicked.

Go if you get a chance- it was a quick 25 minute train ride out of Victoria Station (but don't count on it on Sundays) and a perfectly awesome way to eat up some or all daylight hours.

NDW Day 4: Merstham to Oxted

Now for the boring bit of the trail.

I was kind of dreading this part of the hike that closely follows the M25, the enormous ribbon of motorway that encircles the city of London.  I guess having a trail with such easy access to the city means these small inconveniences are bound to happen.  

I couldn't have picked a better day for it- late October and I'm still putting on SPF.

However, the one wrench in my plan was that I didn't get an earlier start.  I was planning on knocking 20 lonely miles out, but I reached the halfway point a little after 1pm....meaning I would have walked the last miles in the dark.  I quit after a mere 9 miles of walking rather then deal with that.  The clocks were set back last weekend and I just haven't adjusted yet, but the sun is dead and gone by 5pm now.

The trail was a little boggy in places but it climbed and stayed on the ridge for most of the walk, and I did enjoy myself.  You couldn't as much see the motorway as much as you could hear the constant drone of it at the foot of the hill.  Visions I had of walking right next to the road ended up being false, and it was a pretty countryside walk, if not a little noisy.

And looky there!  You can see London, sprawled out in front of you from the top of your first hill.

 Rather foolishly, I did not bring my camera, so these are all from the phone as I thought I would just end up with a lot of pictures of semi trucks.   So, pictures aren't the best today.

I had the trail to myself, too.  I saw a handful of people on horseback at one point, and bumped into one other through hiker doing day trips from London.

It was just so pleasant out,  I thought I was being rather pokey, but I ended up doing a respectable 2.6 mph.  If I kept that up without stopping to rest the dogs, I would have made it to Otford just after sunset.  Instead, I turned off to Oxted and took the train back to London.   Despite the beautiful late-October weather, the trail had turned off Oxted downs and was in site of the M25 for a long stretch, and I just wasn't inspired to keep going.

Not the most amazing day of walking, but any day walking in the countryside beats anything else I could think of doing, so it was all around a winning sort of day.  Plus, those half-hour train rides are adding up to be a rather spectacular lace shawl.