A Walk From Mach.

There have been a few showers today but for the most part it has stayed dry.

It was already light by the time I took my tea outside to watch the world. My attention was caught by a line of lights in the distance. Too long to be a train and they weren't moving. We'd seen them before and thought they must be something to do with work on the railway line. But was that on the line on our side of the river or on the far side going towards Aberdyfi? The mystery was solved when I drove that way later in the day. There by the railway crossing were two JCBs with blue lights on their roofs and strung out along the railway track were poles with lights on. 

The next thing to catch my attention was a lone cloud above the line of mist over the river. Looking at the time info on my photos there was no cloud in the photo above taken at 7.59 but there it was at 8.05 and minutes later it had gone. 

I was driven indoors by the appearance of rain drops and so missed the first rainbow that others posted on FB but I caught the next one but couldn't fit it all in the photo.

Today's walk was in the hills around Mach. 

We did quite a bit of walking along lanes with a detour through a friendly lady's garden to look at the river before heading uphill for some better views.

This was the view from our lunch stop where the 12 of us settled on a grassy bank to eat our food.

Plenty of nice views and some welcome blue skies looking out towards Snowdonia.

Eventually we headed back down to the valley and along a very muddy riverbank before arriving at a wedding venue that I recognised from a walk in 2022. (Will save those photos for tomorrow.) 

Having been stuck behind a driver who drove at slower speed than I would have liked but sped up in the few places where it might have been possible to overtake on the way to Mach I was looking forward to a more relaxed drive home. But no, a few minutes from Mach a road gritter pulled out of a layby just ahead of me and began flicking out not grit (salt) but some sort of liquid. (Apparently some councils are using a mixture of brine and salt though I would have thought that seawater might work.) I tried to keep back which was hard when you're on a road with a 60mph limit and a truck doing 30mph or less so had to keep putting the washers on to clear the windscreen of whatever it was making it smeary. Never mind I thought, soon I'll be turning off the main road onto the road that runs over the bog to the coast. There are two straight stretches of that road which are fun to whizz down as there are no side turnings and the road undulates due to the unstable ground below. So you can imaging how my spirits sank when coming up to the turnoff the gritter lorry indicated it was going that way too. Fed up with the muck on my windscreen I hung right back and resigned myself to driving at 25 mph all the way to Borth where 20 mph is the limit anyway. But I had to smile when an impatient driver who hadn't looked ahead came right up close behind me, overtook and then got stuck right behind the gritter. The Met office has put out a yellow snow warning for the middle of the week so it's good that the roads are being treated.

Remember the incident last week of the car that drove through the wall of our local hospital? One of my fellow walkers works at the hospital and told me how it happened. The driver of the car had just dropped his wife off for treatment and had returned to his car. This car was an automatic and something went awry with the drive/park thingy which sent him forward over the edge, down a 6ft drop and in through the wall of the hospital. It was a miracle that nobody was seriously injured. I don't know how automatic cars work never having driven one. Manual cars are standard here and if you were to take your driving test in an automatic car you wouldn't be allowed to drive a manual but it you take your test in a manual car then you can drive an automatic. I think automatic cars are mainly for people who can't manage gears but it sounds like some people might get confused driving one of those as well. Or they could just go wrong.