This was the invite from Joyce.
"This week, Wednesday March 11th, we are visiting Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire. It's a National Trust property. There are some great public rights of way around the area but it's easier to use their car-park, toilets and coffee shop if we are card holders. I'm sure John will offer a car share from Bury so pls contact him.
Lets meet at the Farm Cafe at 10.30am when it opens and fortify ourselves before walking. Bring a sarnie as we might be walking at lunchtime and stop at a bench. I intend on staying at Wimpole until 4pm but we will stop walking when others have had enough. The daffodils should be glorious."
So I arranged to meet Ann and Anna at Skyline Sports Centre to leave at 9:15. It shouldn't be more than an hour to Wimpole Hall, should it? But woe number one. If we had arranged to meet and leave at 9am everything would have been fine...
Ann was already there when I arrived at 9:05, but where was Anna? 9:09 I got a message. "Stuck in a jam on the A14 just before the Rougham turn-off. Can you wait for me?". Of course we could, but if we didn't leave by 9:30 we were likely to be late. But the blockage cleared and Anna arrived, a little flustered. She said the A14 was flowing freely now, so we set off to join the A14 at the same junction just after 9:30. But woe number two. If we had headed back past my house to join the A14 at the sugar factory we would have been fine...
A mile or so into our journey on the A14 we ended up in stationary traffic. For over half an hour. There had been another incident, a crash between the Bury St. Edmunds junctions off the A14. Nothing we could do. We let Joyce know. She was already at Wimpole Hall! Five others met with her to have coffee at the Home Farm cafe as planned, but we were going to be late.
We arrived at Wimpole Hall just before 11. But it was quite a walk to the cafe. As we got there, Joyce and the rest were ready to start the walk. "But you can get a takeaway drink from the cafe and we'll walk slowly and you can catch us up", said Joyce. But woe number three. I had got the leaflet from the entrance, but found it didn't have a map of the walks. If I had had the map we would have been fine....
I had had a glance at Joyce's map and could visualise roughly where we were to go. But we had no map ourselves so we were going to have to follow the waymarking signs. Woe number four. If we had foregone the coffee and just walked with them, everything would have been fine...
With some embarrassing shenanigans about how to actually get onto the route, which I won't explain, (woe number five) we got on the route some 10-15 minute behind them. We saw them at the top of the hill and waved. And when we got up there, there was a choice of paths. "We're following the purple walk", Joyce had said. So we followed the waymarked sign. Woe number six. It was wrong, showing only alternative routes for people walking in the other direction and not the route for those walking it the wrong way round like us. And woe number seven. I hadn't picked up the text message from Joyce saying to take the sandy path.
Some 10 minutes later the path we were following hadn't bent round to go east as I had remembered from my fleeting glimpse of Joyce's map. I phoned her and then saw her text. Oh no. We had to retrace our steps. "Maybe we can catch you up when you stop for lunch", I said optimistically.
But then I did the sums. Woe number eight. We were maybe 10 minutes or so behind them at the start. At 3mph walking that is 1/2 mile. So if they were to walk at 2 3/4 mph we were to walk 1/2 mph faster than them we would catch them in about an hour. But now we were probably 30 minutes behind them. And that is quite enough woe for the day!
We tried. But although we were marching as fast as we could, we still stopped to enjoy the wonderful views. In the end, although they had stopped for lunch and stopped again to wait for us a bit, we finished about 5 minutes behind them. Thanks for waiting!
And then we had a welcome break for drinks before embarking on our lovely afternoon ventures, together at last, to The Folly and the Walled Garden. That was all great fun and we finally left our woes behind us. We even got back to Skyliner Sports Centre in less than an hour.
Here is our route from the Home Farm to our drinks stop....
,,, including our 1/2 mile there and back detour. The aerial view shows what a landscape we were walking in with the magnificent parkland of the estate.
So here are just a few of my photos of the day.
The stables.
Some of the masses of daffodils.
Going the wrong way on the new path.
From the Chalk Ridge we could see Cambridge. The university library and, I think, St. John's College chapel are in this shot.
In the woods. At this point we were less than 10 minutes behind the others.
Hooray! All together again. I'm glad they didn't have to wait long for us at the end.
After our cafe stop we did another walk to the Folly and back.
I loved the reeds at the edge of the lake.
The walled garden was a treat with its varieties of crocuses and interesting clump of euphorbia.
So thanks Joyce for the lovely day out, even if it didn't quite go to plan. And apologies to Ann and Anna for marching us around the Chalk Ridge walk and taking us in the wrong direction for a while.
I think we'll be back. We never got to visit the house, for example, or see nay lambs. And there are other walks we could do too.
You can see more details of our walk here on MapMyWalk and more of my photos here on Flickr.
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