Friday 11th September 2020 Day 171

7.00    Well I certainly made up for my sleepless night last night.  Went out like a light and didn’t wake up once during the night, unheard of but I am very grateful for it. 

Looking at the pond from the bathroom window, the level seems to have gone down quite a bit in not so many days and I am wondering whether there is a little leak somewhere.  These pond liners, even the expensive ones, which this was, do not last for ever, in fact I think it is about ten years that they guarantee and we are over that now by several years. I have absolutely no idea what to do about it and will have to look it up on Google but for now I will mark the water level and keep topping up.

Today I am meeting my friend Wendy at Maresfield recreation ground and we are going to go along from there to the woods.  We have never been before so we do not know what to expect.

10.00  We meet up and Audrey is raring to go.  It is a pleasant morning for walking and soon we leave behind the pretty houses, under the busy A 22 and the huge and beautiful Powder Mills house which is skirted by the footpath, with its lovely big lakes and parkland.

The woods are quite dense and there are footpaths and deer paths everywhere but we try to follow the direction of the yellow arrow we saw at the start until we are so far away that we lose a bit of touch with direction.   Now fair to say that Wendy is the only person I know who is possibly even more hopeless at direction than me and that’s saying something.  We keep coming to sort of crossroads in clearings and just keep taking the path we fancy, thinking we can find the way back.  Audrey is in her element and we don’t see a single other living soul.

After about three quarters of an hour we decide to wander back but where is back?  We feel as if we are in a maze and try to remember but we keep coming across barbed wire and Private Land notices and another notice by a lake informing us that poachers have been here (not sure what we should do about that)

An hour goes by and we are no nearer knowing the way and probably even further away.  We try the sat nav but it is not working properly and, in the end,, I phone my son in London and share our location with him. Wendy borrows my phone to phone her daughter who lives locally too.  He tries hard to help and says things like ‘Go West from where you are’ and ‘go to the North end of the lake’ which might as well be Martian language as far as we hopeless pair are concerned and then my phone dies.

Two hours later and by some fluke or Providence, I recognise a path and we head confidently back to the recreation ground.  I plug in my phone and it seems we have done over five miles before the phone died so probably more like seven or eight altogether.  We now discover that Wendy’s daughter is in the woods searching for us and we call the search off.

That’s the second time I have been lost in woods in the past month or two.  In future I will take some cotton to reel out as I go.