Escape
Yesterday we finally managed to escape the gravitational pull of hearth and home.
Gandalf eye view of running away
We had hoped to get away about a month ago, but a bout of proper flu put the dampers on that. Four days in bed followed by two weeks and more of feeling grim and recovering meant that our marvellous plan to go and catch the tail end of the mountaineering season in Austria had to be shelved.
How many Prime Ministers do you think the UK will get through while we are away?
So, a new and somewhat vague plan was hatched. We had been unable to decide between sailing directly to Spain and on to the climbing hot spots of that perpetually sunny country or to sail to Normandy and drive over the Pyrenees for some late season hiking before heading to the sun.
To my overactive imagination the choice was clear. Should we land on the Normandy beaches amidst a hail of machine gun and mortar fire, or be shipwrecked by a rogue whale in the Bay of Biscay?
We chose the former. It has been 78 years, 4 months and nineteen days since the Normandy beach landing, so we were almost certainly safe. Well, I was. Mrs P on the other hand ran the very real risk of death by museum.
Mrs Ps museum firing squad ignore her pleas to “shoot me now!” until she has looked at “Just one more gallery.”
That is not strictly true. Mrs P is actually more than happy to wander around Second World War museums. She may not be quite as obsessed as yours truly, but she finds it all genuinely interesting. I am a very lucky WW2 nerd. She even asks pertinent questions such as, “What?” and “How?” Before usually returning to ”Why?”
The really rather excellent Overlord Museum
Tomorrow we plan to do such exciting things as source a new tap for Gandalf, before beginning our journey south to the Pyrenees and hot rock in Spain.
Yes, as usual, Gandalf is packed to the gunwales with climbing kit (and now also models of tanks and books about… erm… also tanks) and we hope to get some routes in.
Watch this space over the coming weeks to see photos of climbing, mountains and plates of calamari set before a gurning me.
