Here in England, during lockdown III, we can go for a “local” walk – once a day. But as there is only so much I can reach by just stepping out of my front door, and to keep myself mentally healthy, I decided that a short drive was still “local”. After a look round on the world wide web, I found a nice walk near Sandridge, just north of St Albans. Looking forward to seeing something different than just the village I’m living in, I cheerfully started walking, not knowing that I would actually even have a bit of an adventure as well… ?

A nice, cold day – there was even a hint of sleet for a few minutes – great for a nice walk. Nice light, together with some dark clouds makes for interesting (I know… personally choice…) pictures:

The walk was graded easy, but with my lack of exercise during the covid period, I felt my legs, even doing rolling hills like these:

And he (she?) just posed for me, giving me ample time to select the right lens… If all else fails, that may well be my New Year’s cards sorted for this year:

Even if it was nice weather that Saturday that I went out for this walk, we have had quite a bit of rain during the winter months. So some parts of the route were rather boggy…:

And then, I got to this tree… Thought it would make for a nice picture against the blue sky, with a bit of cloud as if it was smoke coming from a far away house, the moon out (just above the tree). So a photo I took. Then checked my phone to see if I was still on the right path, and continued my walk… not knowing what had just happened…

This was one of the parts of the route with a bit of an incline, and at the top I needed to decide if I was to turn left or right… so I reached for my phone in my pocket. But much to my despair, there was no phone in my pocket! Checked again, checked my bag… still no phone… must have lost it…! What to do, other than retracing my steps to see if I could find it somewhere. All the way back to the boggy patch (see photo above) where I was absolutely sure that I had used my phone… nowhere a phone to be found.

Walking round the boggy patch, thinking what to do next, I then heard whistling and shouting. Looking where the noise came from, I noticed 2 fellow wanderers who clearly were trying to get my attention, as there was nobody else there. And yes indeed – they had found my phone!

You may well wonder why I think that I’d lost it when taking the above picture of tree, cloud and moon… Well – I had a GPS tracker on, revealing the journey my phone had made, and at which point that had diverted from my journey while going on its own journey with the fellow wanderers… (Btw – I’m not even sure I like that tree-cloud-moon picture that much… the berries or the robin are better, I think…)

Anyway – thus reunited with my phone, I happily finished my walk.

The website describing my walk, suggests that the concrete block in the above photo could be part of one of the WW II road blocks, which were thrown up in 1940, and intended to help Dads’ Army (the Home Guards) slow German invasion forces.

And that was the end to a nice walk, across nice country side. With an adventure – not so enjoyable at the time, but all’s well that ends well!