Fun at the farm

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An Alpine cycling adventure - Part II

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Day 6 - Barcelonnette to St Dalmas, 123 km (76 mi) Cols passed: Col de Cayolle (2326 m), Col de la Couillole (1678 m) Despite the brooding skies we left Barcelonnette cheered by dry shorts, confidence that we were within touching distance of our goal and enjoying the atmospheric effect of the wispy mist, high clouds and soft sunlight. Our hopes for the newly adapted route were met and surpassed as we wound our way up a stunning gorge towards Col de Cayolle. Despite a brief hailstorm as we approached the col we stayed dry and enjoyed a pit-stop and blankets amongst the snow pack on the col before negotiating over 1500 m of patchy wet descent to Guillames at 793 m. The high Alps now behind us we climbed back up through the ski resort of Valberg and on to the Col de la Couillole up at 1678 m and rolled back down to 500 m where we expected to spend the night. Our ever-supportive support team had other ideas however and let us know by way of text message that they had found a fantastic ca...
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Rafting the Rio Maipo

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  Feb 5th -  Sometimes travelling is hard, and I have moaned a bit about how covid has made everything harder. But sometimes it's just pure fun.  Not to say that everything about our day out rafting was plain sailing. To begin with we had to get everyone on board (have you ever noticed how many of our idioms come from nautical activities? Ask me sometime about freezing the balls off a brass monkey...).  I enjoyed the water as a kid but I never went white water rafting until I was a fully grown person. I can see how it could be intimidating. We found Natexplora who said they ran kids trips and that was enough to sway the doubters. The fact that we ran the same route as the other six adult-only rafts on our trip was fortunately lost in the joy and thrill of the moment. There is a project to divert water from the Maipo through a hydroelectric tunnel. Apparently, this will reduce the flow of Maipo by 90%. We had heard of this scheme, and we saw these signs, although the ...
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10 December days in England

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Swiss air brought us to England (Apologies for the formatting issues). My six oldest friends live in England, within around 20 miles of each other, along with their six partners and 14 children.  We haven't been to England in the winter in nearly a decade. It was unsurpsingly grey and somewhat surprisingly very dark, very early.  Ottawa is on the same latitude as Rome.  Our "true North" is suprisingly far south.  All of this English gloom was no equal to the congenial cheer that was in full flow in the run up to Christmas - the sunshine of friendship radiating through the pale fog.  We had a very smooth taxi-bus-plane-taxi trip from Chamonix back to Woking and were settled just in time to wave our generous hosts, Nick and Agnes, off to London for their Van Gogh and Shard dinner engagements to celebrate the anniversary of their first date.  We were comfortably house bound for the first couple of days awaiting what else but a covid test result.  When it...
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