New Year greetings for 2022.

After a dismal few weeks, the final daylight minutes of 2021 yielded a pleasant sunset from our terrace, giving a colourful timely photo to brighten up this post. It’s annoying that we missed the recent brief weather window when some excellent inversions were reported from the mountains.

Last year finally opened up the pandemic barriers and we enjoyed some excellent backpacks and tent pitches. Unfortunately this year is off to an inauspicious start with infections clocking up record numbers and the trains running to special reduced timetables, requiring careful planning. We shall probably focus on the nearby Peak District or South Pennines for a while where transport is more frequent.

So all the best to everyone and good walking.

Our best wishes to everyone for the coming year, though hoping for a better 2021 is setting a depressingly low bar. At least the view of the snowy trees from our window taken yesterday cheers up this New Year milestone post a bit.

Our position in a CV high-risk group, plus our reliance on public transport, destroyed our backpacking hopes for 2020 – no trips at all last year. Just a single day outing to Martin Mere before CV hit us, then single-day walks from the door, a few of which we wrote up on the site.

Satisfactory local backpack routes are very difficult to devise, but we came up with one where stealth pitching would be feasible with care, as we have often done in the past, but even this route would need a few miles by taxi to the start point. However our local taxi firms seem indifferent to the pandemic. There is no mention of it on their websites and the drivers don’t even wear masks, as we discovered a few months ago when forced to use one to attend the funeral of my sister (yet another downer to add to the general theme of FU-2020).

So we wait, currently in tier 4, doing short day walks whenever we can. In the meantime keep walking wherever you are.