Blogging at 20:00 on Tuesday 20th December from intended overnighting spot N 54.91392°, W 04.17503° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:54.91392%2C-04.17503
We're having a whizz out over the Christmas period: something we like to do in order to escape the misery of the Joy of the Season.
For long enough leading up to this mini-trip we were intending to head for France. Apart from generally liking France, we really enjoy the fact that during deep midwinter their time zone means we can enjoy daylight until going on 6.00pm. It's just so less depressing.
However, it transpires the French haven't yet sorted out an ongoing parkrun dilemma. We first became aware of this dilemma on last summer's trip, when we discovered to our irritation that celebrated French bureaucracy very much put paid to one our planned running events and - what is more - saw Parkrun France being forced to effectively cancel every single one of the nation's events overnight.
The French parkrun 'problem' revolves around the general requirement for people competing in most forms of organised French sport to have to produce a medical certificate proclaiming they are - on balance - likely to have the good grace to remain alive until the conclusion of the organised event in question.
Should any duly certified participant then have the audacity to ignore the certificate and expire whilst competing, the event organiser does not have to shoulder any litigious culpability: indeed the newly deceased will find their expiration is officially very much their own problem.
Parkrun France had - up until last summer - rather deviously sidestepped this onerous certification requirement by telling the entire truth in as much as parkruns are non-competitive community events (notwithstanding that some people participating in the non-competitive community event do so quite speedily).
Unfortunately this strategy unravelled. Quite how remains a mystery: but it almost certainly involved a lot of Gallic shrugging.
Anyway, whatever is happening (or not happening) to resolve the French parkrun impasse means that instead of going to a country where people who would have previously stayed fit by participating in healthy community events are now destined to become clinically obese and expire sooner than they otherwise would have - we're going to Ireland, instead. We also have a cunning plan regarding our preference for lighter nights...
And so, we're under way. The start of the trip has not been without a few truck-related issues: it was quite reluctant to be raised from it's slumber. We don't normally go quite so long between uses, but it's been mothballed since last summer when we returned from Bulgaria. Chief irritant has been the failure of yet another VDO Speedo: this one was under 12 months old and has, like they do, just plain stopped working. The company that supplied it are supposedly sending yet another one out under warranty but that hardly fills me with confidence. These things really are rubbish and only really any good for catapult target practice.
Today's journey has simply been a full-on driving affair but at least we're now snuggled peacefully in our intended overnighting spot: somewhere we've hung around before and which is both officially and actually one of the best places in the UK for dark skies.
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