Killing time....

After two nights on the sauce in Amsterdam I am now back in the UK till the end of the month. From early July we fly out to South Africa which I'm super psyched for but in the meantime I didn't want to be completely idle whilst in the UK. The weekend of my return to the family estate saw the UK basking in sunshine, you could smell the BBQ's going and all the pubs were rammed. The British summer was well under way it seemed. Of course what this also meant was hot and sweaty climbing walls. I dragged myself down to mile end wall to try and get a session in but it was just grim. I lasted about an hour or so and sacked it off. 

I decided that outdoor climbing was the way forward. Grit may be out, at least in terms of doing something hard, but Ive done very little on the limestone up north and then there is North Wales that I could pop across to. So I now find myself up in the Peak District National Park having driven up yesterday. After arriving I popped out to Beginners Wall that I had looked at a year or so back but it had been seeping badly at the time. Yesterday the stand start of Neil's Wall, the main line there really, was semi dry with only one damp hand hold and the footholds a bit minging so with my new found experience with the kitchen roll i soon got it dry enough to pull on. The stand is 7c i think and although sharp and of course no top out, its pretty good. I managed to piece it together after 30mins or so. I had a look at the harder sit but it was pretty wet so left that for a particularly dry period of weather.  

So that was yesterday and today I was reminded of that other glorious attribute of the great British summer - rain. Not spectacularly heavy rain like what we saw in the Alps but more of a drizzly, blustery sort of nature that seems to be able to go sideways and up as well as the more conventional downwards direction. Anyway I have some plans of what to try and it cant rain as much as it did in the Alps so things are looking up...