WEEKLY BLOG EPISODE 125 | IT’S THE RIMS!

Good morning! How are you today? What’s on your Thursday list (other than reading my weekly blog post, of course?!)? Got a clear and straight forward day ahead of you? Or is yours looking a bit full and frantic like mine?

I honestly don’t know what it is about Thursdays. I’ve mentioned so many times before how I find them to be the most busy and tired of all the weekdays. There’s just something about them that always reminds me that time is getting on – another week nearly over, which fuels my anxiety about time running out and not doing all the things I need or want to do. Yes, my mind is weird.

It’s when the diary looks like this that my One Hour Outside habit becomes even more vital to my wellbeing. Making time to purposefully get outside into the fresh air and natural light is of huge benefit to body, mind and soul, even if I can only manage a handful of minutes away from the to do list. I’d really love it if you tried it with me every day this week – however busy you feel. Worth a go?

Off to CarFest

This particular Thursday is feeling all those things, but also super fun. After my normal working day, which today will be based at home for the first time in over a week thanks to working in Higher Education and it being confirmation time (more on that in a moment), I’m packing up and heading over to CarFest.

I’m joining my Ordnance Survey friends for the weekend and will be mostly based in their pink and purple dome. I had the pleasure of speaking about motorcycle road tripping at the event a couple of years ago, and while I’m not on the line-up in quite the same way this year, I’m very happy to be joining the OS Champions team this bank holiday weekend.

If you’re going to CarFest and want to chat maps and road trips, then make sure you come and say hello!

When I Grow Up…

One of the joys of my role working in higher education (you know, my day job, the thing I do when I’m not outside or writing rambling weekly blog posts), is that I am involved in the melee that is A Level results day and clearing.

This year I took part in my 18th A Level Thursday, which is nothing short of ridiculous (yes, that’s time running away with me again). One thing I’ve learnt in all that time is that calories don’t count at clearing, and so when a colleague offered around home-made ice cream sandwiches on Friday morning, I did not say no. Mmmm mid-morning ice cream… and yes, the ice cream itself was home-made.

Each year I can’t not think about what it is like to be someone receiving results, making decisions that will set them on a certain path, perhaps for the rest of their life. Making significant life choices is hard. And stressful.

Wear a Beanie Hat

I don’t think I ever really answered the “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question – not sensibly, anyway. I would always respond to it with “I just want to write”, or “I don’t know, something where I can wear a beanie hat to work”. Actually, and I know I’ve mentioned this before, for the longest time the real answer was that I wanted to be a Blue Peter presenter. Yea, I think that ship has sailed. But maybe the beanie hat one is still a possibility!

I do actually work in the field I studied at university, but I try not to let that one thing define me. And I think that’s how the world has changed since I started working in Higher Education. We are much better these days at stepping back and looking at the whole picture that is life, rather than us being completely defined by the thing we do to earn money. Yes, I am a Communications Manager, but more importantly, I’m an outdoors loving person who wants to be a good influence on others and have fun with the time I have been given.

If you are reading this having received exam result this summer (or know someone who has), or you are trying to make a life-defining decision, remember that while it feels like this moment matters more than anything in the world right now, nothing you decide today can’t be changed later. Do the thing that feels right, and see where it takes you.

Boilers, Brakes and Bike Wheels

The last couple of weeks have been rather testing in my world of attempting to play at being an adult. We’ve had all the B’s… the boiler stopped providing us with hot water, the car brakes had to be sorted, and I have a rather significant issue with my bike wheels.

Boiler

First up, the boiler. In short, our Nest thermostat stopped working, which meant we unexpectedly had no hot water. To begin with we thought it was the thermostat relay on the hot water cylinder, which had somehow tripped to off, but even with that fixed we couldn’t persuade the Nest to turn the hot water on. Eventually the Nest came up with a W5 error, which is a fried wifi chip inside the unit – most inconvenient, and apparently not uncommon. We got onto Google support, and they sent us a new one… but that one had the same W5 error (almost certainly a faulty return). Very annoying.

Google were not willing to send me a second replacement before they had received the first one back (it was already on the way), so at the time of writing we are still waiting for a working thermostat. Smart homes are great until the related smart devices don’t want to work. And this is after only eight months. Thankfully, we have fashioned a way to get hot water in the meantime, so we aren’t having cold showers anymore – that wore thin very quickly!

Brakes

It’s not the first time since we owned our current car that we’ve developed a bit of a squeal from the brakes. And no, not low pads or a sign of not maintaining the vehicle, but rather, pads that have worn unevenly and are stuck. Great.

A bit of internet research tells us that the model we have is susceptible to stuck brakes; there is a flaw in the brake assembly design that means it’s a very common problem.

I mean, you shouldn’t really need to replace the callipers on modern cars for years and years and years, but our brakes got stuck so badly on a previous occasion that we had to do just that. We didn’t need new callipers this time (phew), but we did need new discs on the back two wheels as they were very scored by the stuck brake pads.

We were able to get booked in at the garage up the road to get the work done quickly – an unplanned expense, and a lot of faff. It’s a shame as the car is nice to drive and everything else seems to be fine. The joys of car ownership!

Bike Wheels

The third B is my bike wheels. I’ve been losing air from my back tyre consistently over recent weeks. I had thought it was coming from the puncture we repaired when on a road trip down in Cornwall, and so dutifully had my rear tyre replaced. I mean, that repair lasted a good nine or ten months, so it did pretty well for a roadside job! Fast forward a couple of months and I was still losing air – not masses, but a psi a day, which was enough to be a pain, and too much for a road trip.

This has been filling me with dread. While I love my bike and it’s a fantastic machine, it is old and not worth very much. If the wheels are shot then this could be the end of the bike, and that was not something I wanted to think about, especially not this close to my next motorcycling adventure.

I dropped into a tyre shop for them to inspect the tyre, valve, and rims for me – and went and bought a doughnut to console myself while they looked at it (a ring doughnut with pink icing and sprinkles, if you’re interested). It wasn’t good news, but could definitely have been worse. It is indeed the rims themselves, but it wasn’t fatal – they are very confident it is something that a refurb can solve.

Temporary Solution

My bike wheels are quite old and worn (you know my bike has been though it!), and at one particular point on the back wheel some corrosion is pushing just a touch on the bead seal, breaking the seal enough to allow a bit of air to escape. I can’t ride to Morocco losing air each day, so I’m currently trying to find a way to get the rims sealed well enough ready for that trip, with a view to getting them refurbished over winter. Refurbing them now would be ideal, but the lead time on that is far too long.

As I write this weekly blog, I think I’ve found a solution courtesy of a small local bike shop who I’m  already booked in with to replace my chain and sprocket after the upcoming bank holiday weekend. They can put on some bead seal paste which should sort things out for now – enough for Morocco at least. Or that’s the hope. Wish me luck, I don’t think I’ll sleep properly until it’s done, this was not part of the Morocco prep list!

Sorry for Moaning

I wrote all this and then nearly got rid of it, as I didn’t think you’d want to read what is effectively a 1,000-word whinge about having to spend money and time sorting things that just need fixing. Stuff like this happens all the time, these B’s really are simply part of normal life. But hey, my weekly blog was always intended to be a place for the stuff in-between adventures – and it’s just been a particularly joyful couple of weeks on that front!

With only one of the three things actually fixed so far, I’m rather hoping that this makes up a full joys-of-adulthood set, and that’s me done for a good while! I guess I’ll let you know.

Mud at Woodchester Park

One very lovely thing that happened in the last week was meeting up with good friend Lesley and her dalmatian Luna for a walk on Saturday morning. When organising where we’d go, she messaged with a pin in a map and said, “have you been to Woodchester Park”. The name rang a bell, but I had a good look on the map and thought no, I haven’t.

We parked up at a very new National Trust Woodchester Park car park at Tinkley Gate, near Nailsworth, where there’s now a café (complete with a wood fired pizza oven…), toilets, some marked trails, and a selection of garden games to play. If you visit, note the car park costs £3 (National Trust members park free), but it only accepts coins – which is a bit strange for a brand new car park.

We headed off along the blue trail, one of two marked routes from this car park, first passing a sign that said the path was “very steep and slippery today” – which turned out to be incredibly accurate. I mean, when the National Trust put out a bucket of walking poles and suggest you take one or two for the walk, you should really know they mean it!

Wooded Valley

The trail took us down a newly laid path (lulling us into a false sense of security), before we picked up a forest track down through woodland. It was indeed thick with mud and very slippery, but we both made it unscathed, although we were at least three inches taller thanks to the clay-mud stuck to our shoes! My new adidas FreeHikers (read last week’s weekly blog) got well and truly christened.

The National Trust website describes Woodchester Park as a tranquil wooded valley containing a ‘lost landscape’ with remains of an 18th- and 19th-century landscape park with a chain of five lakes. Park Mill Pond is the last of these lakes and features a man-made island that is now a heronry.

Our route took us down to the lakes and around Middle Pond, which was a very pretty walk. It was steep, it was muddy, but it was glorious – the water, the trees, the company, just lovely.

It was as we made our way back towards the start of the steep climb that I looked over to the other side of the valley and knew – I’d definitely been here before. I’d already had a strong sense of deja vu, but now I knew for certain. Where we parked up and the National Trust’s new café was what used to be called Thistledown Campsite, where I stayed with Sarah (The Urban Wanderer) for my first GetOutside activity challenge back in September 2019. That was most certainly a memory unlocked moment!

Back Soon

The restoration of this lovely woodland is an ongoing project, and I will certainly be back to explore further. The two waymarked trails (we did both in the end) are attractive, and it’s possible to access Woodchester Mansion (not National Trust) from here, too. Oh, and the coffee and cake at the café is excellent – I had the orange and poppy seed sponge, which was extremely delicious. Next time I go I’ll make sure it’s during pizza cooking hours!

And the best bit? Going for a walk with Lesley and having a good catch up. One of my hopes for 2023 was to do more of just this, it was just what I needed.

That’s Entertainment

Audiobook: East of Croydon, Sue Perkins

My latest adventure-story listen on audible has been East of Croydon by Sue Perkins, which is, in effect, the ‘making of’ story behind her Mekong River documentary series. Well, a making of the documentary, and a making of Sue herself.

You might not think this is an adventure story at first glance, with it being a ‘celebrity memoir’, but I reckon it is. I mean, when a story speaks of showering surrounded by walls black with bugs, being thrown out of a boat whilst taking part in a ridiculous race, and traipsing through the jungle to catch poachers, then it is most certainly an adventure in my eyes!

Perkins paints vivid pictures of the difficulties of life as a TV documentary presenter. I honestly can’t imagine how it might feel to have to present a coherent story to the camera in some of the situations she describes and I have a new found respect for that work. It was funny and sad in equal measure, and every bit as real as I hoped it would be.

My favourite quote from this book is: “However fruitless it may appear, there is a point to everything if you are sufficiently invested in the moment.” Here’s to the now.

Amazon | Waterstones | Hive

Next up on my to-read list is, surprisingly, a novel. I don’t read many of those! I’m already a few chapters in to The Keeper of Stories by Sally Page, which was recommended by a friend. Given I’ve got quite some driving to do this weekend I reckon I’ll be sharing my review in my next weekly blog episode.

Incidentally, if you’ve yet to try audible and fancy it, there’s a three-months for £3 offer on at the moment, which is excellent value (and can be cancelled any time).

See You Next Time…

That’s me done for another random chatty weekly blog post. In the next one I hope to share what fun was had at CarFest. Do come back next week for that.

In the meantime, how about giving my Kula Cloth review a read, or if you want something more story-telling, how about this post chatting through my highlights of motorcycling in Iceland.

Read more Weekly Blogs.

Buy Me a Cuppa?

If you enjoyed this weekly blog episode and fancy supporting me and my mini adventures this year, you can “buy me a coffee” for £3 (well, a cup of tea, if that’s okay?). Head over to Ko-fi to find out more. Thank you.