a sunday walk

Every weekend there are a number of marked out walks we can choose from around Belgium. Here's one a couple of weeks' ago, near Charleroi I think. Some of them, particularly ones around Mons and other parts of Hainaut, include a bit of up and down around the old coal mines. I posted about a "terril" near our house a while ago, and we were talking about this the other day... how these ugly heaps were really disappointing when we were new here, just one other depressing aspect of the Belgian landscape. But now, only 18 months later, we actually love that spot and really appreciate it. Anyway, back to this walk...

We met a "teeny tiny" pony.

There is always a checkpoint somewhere on the route where you can get your logbook stamped and have a snack, or a beer, of course. The group of walkers behind Tadhg were certainly getting through the beers at 11 in the morning!

Here's Brendan copying the menu into the notebook he won at the fundraising tombola at the start point. Of the hundred or so prizes, most of which were complete junk, Brendan won a lovely recycled notebook with attached pen made out of recycled water bottles. Perfect! He was very chuffed and carried it around for a couple of days, taking every opportunity to write in it, no matter the location.

Here we are at the end of the walk. It was just over 6k in total and Tadhg managed over half I think- we've adopted a concept a friend wrote about on her blog, namely that a child can aim to walk about half their age in hours. So we aim for 1.5 hours of walking for Tadhg, and 2.5 hours for Brendan. That's pushing it a bit for Tadhg, so our carriers are still getting lots of use. Brendan only had a couple of short rides on Steve's shoulders up the steeper inclines, but he pretty much did the whole thing.

This was the day after the Carnaval celebrations- muddy shoes and colourful confetti all around.