I had spoken to Paul the owner of the farm and he recommended going to Wistlandpound Reservoir as the walk is quite flat and good for disabled users. It is only about 25 minutes drive away so pretty local. So, imagine our surprise in taking over an hour and a half to find it. This part of the world is not so well signposted, and very few roads have names, which makes it really hard to find a place. My TomTom could not find it, not even in the points of interest. We ended up in Barnstaple which was handy as I needed eye drops as my hay fever has reached fever pitch and even though I am taking double the dose of antihistamines it does not seem to rid me of the symptoms, so I needed eye drops too. After my quick visit to Tesco pharmacy in this rather massive superstore, we left under the navigation of M who had found the place on Google Maps and was now my TomTom but in human form. We got there relieved that we could finally get out of the car and enjoy the place. Needless to say, the dogs were made up to get out of the car too and explore this new place.
As you can see from the header image, it is quite a lovely place to walk around, and the sun was out giving its all to us. We met many other dog walkers and were surrounded by quite literally thousands of blue damselflies which were lovely to look at.
This is what they looked like, although this is not my photograph, but that of David Kitching, taken from the British Dragonfly Society website.
After our jaunt, we came back to the cottage and pottered about as the dogs were totally exhausted by the heat on top of the exciting walk they had. I got the lounger out of the shed and lay there for a bit reading, then fell asleep in the midafternoon sun, and as you would expect, got burned quite a bit. Thankfully I have been a little sun-kissed these last few weeks and I expect it to have calmed down quite considerably tomorrow.
Later this evening we went for another walk with the dogs down a rather rocky lane that part way down has a mound of horse manure that would rival any medium-sized hill, in other words, it was massive. Not a highlight of the walk but all the same an amusing sight.
This evening we have both kicked back and relaxed on our own couches with a dog each keeping us company and read with Classic FM on in the background.
All in all, I think it was another successful day of relaxation.
Mr Knitter 