A Walk up the Roman Steps.

Today we had a grey morning followed by a sunny afternoon.

Not a bad day for going out for a walk with Peter. (If it's not raining it's a good day.) First we drove to Mach and called in at the Royal House Café to stock up with their delicious food.  That included a panini for Peter and a custard slice for me to eat on our walk.

Parking by the roundabout on the way in to Mach we climbed the Roman Steps. They follow a medieval packhorse trail that leads to Wylfa Common where the Romans had a lookout post so they might possibly have been roman. Other sources suggest they were cut by the workers in medieval times to get to the quarry on the common.

It was a steepish climb that gave us great views across the valley and northwards into Snowdonia.

Something we really like about this part of Wales is the way you can quickly get into wild country. The main roads run along the valleys through a scattering of villages and small towns and usually just a strip of fields on either side. But turn off the main road onto one of these single track roads and within a mile or less you reach what I like to call the wild country.

They may be farms on the softly sloping hill tops but the rest is either forestry land or sheep grazing land. And luckily for us most of this is open access for people like us to walk, cycle or (I presume) to ride on.

We followed a path up on to Wylfa Common where we found a spot to perch and enjoy the view. Much as the romans might have done. I found a reference to a roman lookout post on Wylfa Common which would make sense as there are the remains of a roman fort over at Pennal on the other side of the valley. There we stopped to have our lunch. The wind was icy so I was glad of the coffee that we had brought with us.

From there we retraced our steps back to the car at Mach. We had parked in a large lay-by in which as usual were two converted lorries complete with solar panels, a generator and crazy painted on designs. What caught Peter's eye was this Hanomag truck. It's a German army truck complete with turret for a machine gunner.

The bias binding finally arrived in the post and I have already sewn bias binding on both armholes. There is a slight possibility I'll have it done by the time for aerobics but I have got a full day tomorrow so we'll see. My sewing nearly caused a disaster this afternoon. As it was hard to see when sewing black bias binding on black netting with black thread, now there's a surprise, I fetched an old desk lamp to give me some better light. All went well until ..... with a flash and a bang off went the light and so too my PC. I pulled the light plug out of the wall socket and tried to restart my PC but to no avail. Had I killed my poor PC? It turned out the breaker had gone and all the sockets on this side of the house were off including the internet router. I disconnected my PC from the wall and once Peter reset the breaker all was back to normal. The faulty lamp will be going straight to the dump.

It was probably a good thing we went for a walk which included lots of 'up' as last night's Pilates was mostly kettlebells. Rachel kept warning us that we would feel the effects on Thursday so hopefully keeping moving will have done me good. It was quite funny before the class last night as we compared all the different kettlebells we had brought along. I had brought my 4kg one as I think the 6kg is not only too heavy for me right now but it would have been hard work carrying it there and back. People had brought all different weights of kettlebell along from 2kg to 10kg. There are also some mini ones that are very deceptive. Although only the size of a large grapefruit they too can weigh up to 10kg. The lady next to me had been given a 10kg one by a friend but realised she wasn't going to be able to use it. Luckily Rachel our teacher swapped it for a 6kg one.

Tonight I've been to choir, the first time since before Christmas. There were 20 of us and we mainly sang familiar songs to get us back into the swing of things. We don't spend too much time chatting but it was nice to see familiar faces again.