C2C for Lesley - NNAS bronze award

A week and a half ago as well as going up to Yorkshire for Burns night, I also went to do a course with Caroline for the weekend. It was a Bronze NNAS Navigating course. We thought this would be really useful for the coast to coast as it teaches you how to read a map, use a compass and generally get yourself around on footpaths, open access area and public rights of way.

The course was brilliant, exactly what we needed to know - how to find where you are on a map, orientate it based on your surroundings and using a compass and generally how to follow paths and hopefully therefore not get too lost when we did the coast to coast in September.

There was a little bit of theory work in the morning on the Saturday to learn about contor lines on maps and how they would show different shapes on the ground, a bit of info about using an ordnance survey map and what types of maps to use for what circumstances. It was all very interesting and then slightly scary when we went out to our it into practice on day one.

We started in Newton under Roseberry and walked around the hills from there.

 We ended up here for lunch.

 There were some stunning views along the way but unfortunately neither of us were warm enough to take too many photos

 This was our route for day 1

 By the end of the day the wind was so strong and we were so cold we just had to get back. The day was really interesting and we learnt a lot but there was a lot of stopping and learning to orientate our maps, working out how many steps it would take to get to our next checkpoint or how long it would take to get there based on the distance to be travelled. We also had to start to think about what we should notice around us along our route and when we got to our destination. I managed to get ear ache from the wind hence why I was so wrapped up with my hat and hood on at this point.

Our homework for the evening was to plan a route that we could potentially do on the Sunday. We both did this at home and worked out our timings for the route we made which I think will almost be the most useful thing we’ve learnt to do this weekend. It means that we can work out how long it may take us to walk each day to our next destination.

The following day we reviewed our homework in the morning over an amazing hot chocolate

I managed to leak water from my water bladder all over the floor by sitting my bag on the bite valve on it - need to make sure I don’t do that again! Quite embarrassing.

After this we ran away (or limped in my case) to head off for our walk. We didn’t go quite so far today but mostly just practiced the techniques that we had learnt on the Saturday. My knee was pretty sore from the day before - i think it was partly because I had walked differently to how I would normally do the day before - checking our steps and trying to keep up with longer legged people and also I’m not totally convinced that my boots are how I want them to be too.

I didn’t get many photos at all on the Sunday as all I was hugely concerned about was getting back and still being able to walk the following day. The only ones I took were right back where we started as there were these wooden sculptures

We were both very pleased to find out at the end of the course that we had passed and there will shortly be a shiny certificate on its way to us. It was a very useful course and although the cold and my knee hurting were not too pleasurable I think we’ve both learnt enough to try to stop either of these things from happening on the c2c walk in September.