Winter Walk

When I saw L from the B&B on New Year’s Eve I mentioned that I had been walking quite a bit. Now that she is fully recovered from her broken leg she was hoping that we could walk sometime together and made a plan to meet yesterday. The sun was out but it was still pretty arctic. I threw on some warm clothes and took the train to her house. On the way I stopped at the local grocery store to buy some fresh yeast that H requested. As I was checking out of the insanely busy store, the clerk asked me if I was going to be doing some baking. I explained that my husband would be doing some later. She laughed and said, “He could come up here and start selling in our car park after we run out”. It was definitely looking like that was going to happen.

When I got to L’s she was all ready to go in her full-length dress coat, fur hat, and her bag packed with a thermos of coffee and the dreaded mince pies. I say dreaded because I don’t like them and was happy for Christmas to be over so I could stop declining them. Now they were back. I was glad to see that she did have some proper snow boots. I made sure she was okay walking in this weather. After her dramatic spill last year, I didn’t want to be responsible for her falling again. She had one of those walking maps that H and I couldn’t understand and suggested we use it to follow this 8 mile path. I was comforted to see that she even though she is a local, she didn’t understand the map’s directions either. We got about a steep 5 mile walk in before the sun started to set, even past an ostrich farm.