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Decided to take my camera out on my early morning walk with Joe this morning – and try my hand at some macro phototgraphy Gallery Here

too hot for this one – about 20k round the western fells – a tough enough walk made even harder by the heat – the next day was spent splashing around in Wastwater

Gallery Here

Rob has just uploaded his gallery of sunday at Wastwater and ravenglass beach

so i won this competition…. thanks to everyone who voted for me…. and i won a day out at wimbledon with Getty photographer Clive Brunskill and got my hands on some pretty impressive camera gear… these are my photos

So rob and I had a plan… In the water park, there is a footpath called the trans penine trail – I never really gave it much thought, thinking that it really just spanned sale to stockport.

Anyway, after seeing this site I learned that the trail does in fact span the width of the country – running from Southport to Hull, so myself and rob had a drunken idea, to explore some of this.

Which is how we came to be at Manchester Victoria station at 07:30 on a Saturday morning waiting for a train to southport – how we actually ended up on the train to clitheroe I’m not sure, but we bailed out at salford and luckily the train to southport stopped there.

rolling through the countryside to southport 2 things became apparent, 1) this was going to be a seriously hot day, 2) my hangover was going to hurt 3) the map is sitting on the kitchen table, technically that is 3 but I never realised the third until we got to southport.

first stop then was the southport tourist office, who for some reason, only had maps of the hull leg of the journey – I’m not quite sure why that was, so it was up to waterstones to get a copy, and off we went.

The first stage was very pleasant indeed, from southport beach, down through the wide flat meadows to north Liverpool – getting lost around aintree and then onto old railway line that took us right through Liverpool – and gave us much needed shade – through Liverpool – stopping at a sainsburys on the way. I would love to tell you where this sainsburies was, but unfortunately I don’t have a clue, I did ask someone, but they answered in bizarre riddles, with the only information I actually gleaned was that we were about half an hour from speke and ages from warrington….

So back on the bikes, the paths were fairly deserted, due to the upcoming england portugal game, but the sun was beating down fiercely – in total we drank:

4l of water
1.5l of lucozade
1.5l of powerade
4 pints of coke

each

at around speke, we came of the path and had to ride on the road through the ridiculously posh area of Hale, and down towards the mersey and Widnes.

From about this point on the journey became progressively more painful, widnes, spike island, warrington, lym, altrincham all became a blur as we got our heads down and tried to get back – at altrincham we decided we couldn’t get much further without food and drink so we stopped for a pub lunch. The england game was going into penalties and I think you would have been hard pushed to find two people who cared less as myself and rob lay in agony outside on benches. After fed and watered we managed the last 7 miles back home with no problems

I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked due to the camera being in my rucksack, its one of those occasions when I wished I had just brought a compact camera – I was just too tired to keep stopping for photos. Also there was an incredible amount of dirt on my camera which I haven’t photshopped out – I have since cleaned the camera – but you will see the dirt on these pictures

Gallery Here