Of course we needed one final holiday before travelling around the world for a year!
We went down to Devon for a weekend on Dartmoor with Andy and Stewart. Beginning with a stopover in Bath and great breakfast at Jika Jika on George Street – top tip. The main event of the weekend was Dragon Archery, which is just a brilliantly fun way to have a stab at archery. The website explains everything, it only remains for me to add that it genuinely is enormous fun. A spiffy hike on Dartmoor and a wander around Dartmouth (beautiful town, surprisingly undervisited) rounded out the weekend.
Then we went on, just the two of us, to “practise” with our backpacks and equipment on a three day hike along the south-west coast path. We chose the beautiful yet tough section from Westward Ho! down to Bude. Tough because of the 20+ river valleys that cut through the high cliffs, meaning every day included a big handful of knee-jarring descents and thigh-burning ascents. Over 3000 metres in fact, which is roughly three ascents of Ben Nevis! It was probably a little too much.
The finale of the week was spending a day as Otter Keepers at the Buckfastleigh Otter Sanctuary! Obviously chopping up fish and cleaning pools was exciting enough, but hand-feeding the pair of Asian shortclaw otters fully deserves the epithet AWESOME!
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