There’s painting to be done outside – some woodwork and the garage door. Unfortunately, the layer of frost that’s still on the ground at three o’clock in the afternoon has forced me indoors to watch the darts on TV. And to update the trusty blog.
It’s terrifically cold at the moment. No doubt my East Coast US friends are laughing as they read this, since the temperature here is hovering around a cosy (to them!) zero Celsius, whereas it’s in the minus double figures over there. Temperatures hovering around zero at three in the afternoon, however, are freakishly cold here. The Lovely Melanie is just back from going to the shops with Millie and she called it ‘face-hurting weather’. I call it ’staying indoors and not painting the garage weather’ – the paint brushes would probably just stick to the metal if I tried…
It was damn cold yesterday, too, but there was at least some milky sunshine which removed the frost from areas it passed over. We took advantage of that (after I’d finished sanding down the accursed garage door) to go and visit Joydens Wood – warning – that link is a .PDF file, but only a small one. Oh, and there is no apostrophe in Joydens, before people write to correct me (I’ve got a Masters degree in English, this is the kind of thing I know about).
Joydens Wood is a big, well, it’s a wood, I guess, about a mile from our house. We have other woods, but Joydens is significantly bigger than them. It’s also more difficult to get to, which is why we haven’t been there before. Yesterday, however, we wrapped up warm, put on our walking boots, packed a flask of Vimto and the camera, and set off to visit there. This journey wasn’t as easy as we had hoped, though: the normally excellent Yahoo! Maps is almost completely useless, Google Maps was only slightly better, and the map on the PDF I linked to before is… Let’s call it enigmatic, shall we?
It was a bus ride and then a walk, and after an ill-fated detour down a dual carriageway (on foot, remember), a lot of wailing by the Bubbah, Millie falling asleep on my shoulders, and even the Lovely Melanie beginning to muse out loud about the very existence of our destination, after all that, and literally seconds before we were about to turn around and go home, I spotted a small stile with a sign saying ‘To Joydens Wood‘ on it.
Phew.
Everybody rallied a bit at this point, sufficiently so for us to lift the Bubbah’s buggy over a small, but noxious tributary and to discover the wonders of Joydens Wood, a few small examples of which you can see on Flickr. Because it had taken us longer than expected to get there we only spent less than an hour in the woods – and because they’re so big we barely scratched their surface – but they’re very pretty even in their bare winter state, and we stumbled across some of the promised World War Two bomb craters that pockmark the woods; although, I would never have realised they were bomb craters if the PDF guide hadn’t prewarned me: once you know, though, they’re obvious. I took a few pictures of the girls in them, but it’s quite hard to tell – Millie’s height skews the perspective a bit!
Somewhat remarkably we then walked all the way home (Millie on my shoulders for about half the distance, but pushing her toy buggy the rest of the way), stopping only for a nice cake in ‘Millie’s Cafe’. Millie’s Cafe isn’t really called Millie’s Cafe, but the Lovely Melanie always refers to it that way because she takes the girls there quite often when I’m at work, and the lovely staff there all call Millie by name, so Millie’s Cafe it is
Think of it as like Cheers for small children.
Now, however, we’ve got a bit of a taste for Joydens. and I’ve ordered an Ordnance Survey map of the area so that next time we’ll know how to get there, what to see, and where to see them. Everyone had a really nice time out and about yesterday,and I, for one, am really looking forward to going back there – forewarned is forearmed and all that, eh?
