Dartmoor 2

The Long Drive.

Previously I have woken up at a gawd awful hour, often before I have fully realised I am asleep, and set off.

There is good and bad to this plan, but the bad is outweighing the good, or is it the good element is shrinking.

The good was a clearer M25 to travel.

The bad was everything else.

Last time I travelled though the commercial traffic at 2am was considerable and driving a car at night sandwiched between two 18 ton(?) objects going along at literally breakneck speeds failed to appeal.

Add the fact my body clock told me I should be asleep and when the sun does eventually peep above the horizon it glares straight into me, its a recipe for fail.  And fail on England’s motorways can be terminal.

So this time I travelled in a more civilised manner, daylight.

Armed with a route map provided by google for some reason I will never fathom I took the northern route of the M25.

20 years of driving this hellish road has taught me you never get past the m11 junction without delays because of accidents.

I will save you the tedium of the journey we all know so well, but lets just add A LOT of roadworks on the M25 into the mix.  A lot of the motorway miles were done in second and first gear.  I travelled at the sort of speeds which would have tried the patience of a Georgian in a sedan chair.

Eight long, long hours later I arrive at Ivybridge.

Dartmoor

Google Earth (oh blessed be thy name) had highlighted a few places I might be able to park and get onto the moor in double quick time.  Zooming in as close as I could and then some searches through online image banks it appeared double yellow lines were unknown to the area.

So unlikely to my mind, I refused to believe it, and spent considerable time worried about exactly how I was going to park the car.

I need not have worried, it was as the techno-gods had promised.

Parked, it was time to start.

The sheer spine crushing weight of my ruck hit home in that instant.  Well in the instant I tried to actually get it on my back and having done that rise to my feet.

This was not going to be easy.  But, I reasoned, this was the first day of course it was going to be the most difficult.  I would get used to it.

Off I set.

Oh mighty google earth why have thou forsaken me.

It looked easy from my armchair at home, drawing lines on the map, shovelling them into the gps as waypoints.

“just follow the track up Piles Hill” I remember saying to myself, my minds eye filled with green and pleasant vista’s as legs Spring-heeled Jack would have been proud of ate up the distance.

Well now it faced me, it was a lot larger than a 21inch monitor and it most definitely was no flat screen.

The initial climb up to the moor was outrageous, it was the fag end of the Two Moors Way.  Time proved it was actually the most difficult bit of walking I did on Dartmoor.

I was walking up a rubble strewn ravine, sweat not so much rolled off me as burst from me as the days heat seemed determined to boil all the moisture from the earth and myself.

At least Dartmoor itself was green and pleasant when it swam into view.

Western Beacon might as well have been the South Col at that point.  Still in denial I began the ascent.

My initial walking plan had been far to adventurous.  I planned on burning that chair when I got home and use a one legged milking stool as a computer chair, never will the comfort of my surroundings blind me to the discomfort of my plans.

As I made my way up Western Beacon walking Plan B was being organised.

Time was now getting on and really I had to sort out my sleeping arrangements.  I need extra time to get back into the swing of things and so the first patch of semi-flat ground was needed.

Everyone that has wild camped knows the earth is not flat.  There might be an 8 foot by 4 foot flat piece of ground occurring naturally on the earth’ surface outside of a saltpan but it does not exist on Dartmoor.

Fortunately I can pretty much sleep anywhere and as tiredness increases this happy ability increases exponentially.  The wind was rather lively but, I reasoned, once lying on the ground things would not be so bad.

I had arrived in Dartmoor, safe and sound, the next test was keeping the Houndini in the bivvy bag.