I've just booked to go and see my creator. She lives a long way away from me. I could never hope to flap my dress and fly that far. Not in one day. I think if I did try I wouldn't go the way the coach goes to where she lives. I would take a more direct route. It's much prettier. And it's much shorter too. It would probably still take me three days to fly though. At least.
This week is going to be very exciting too because on Friday Winefride and I are going to be taken to the Great North Snowdogs farewell event and we will see all our dog friends again. I'm hoping that we get to see the dog called Patchwork who lived in Kielder which is also a long way away. We want to have our picture taken with Patchwork. We would also quite like to sit on the dog who lived at The Sage because he was on a big platform that made sitting on him impossible. I wish the people at The Sage hadn't forced their dog to live on a platform where he couldn't go for a walk.
It's all quite exciting.
The day I've been telling you about in my blog was quite exciting too. I'm not sure I want to repeat the excitement of nearly being eaten twice but there were plenty of other exciting things to smile and whoop about.
We had been walking along the banks of the River Irwell, a short river that starts in some hills that I want to go and see next year and ends in the middle of Manchester where it flows into a big canal.
As we walked we looked through a very long fence to our left and kept seeing graves. Lots of graves. My person likes graveyards. She does and she doesn't care if you all think her strange. She says graveyards can be very pretty, very peaceful and very calming. This particular graveyard had ever so many graves. We passed a section of very plain gravestones, all exactly the same size and shade of grey and then came to a section of much more ornate graves that had been decorated with all kinds of things, like shrines. This was a Roman Catholic section of the graveyard.
My person said that she wanted to visit the graveyard. Not that day because it was already raining quite hard. But one day. And we've done it too. We've been to the graveyard. On a much drier day. We took Winefride with us and we all had a lot of fun except my person started crying at one point when reading some of the inscriptions to infants who had died. I had to comfort her. Winefride ran off and played and we thought that would be okay if we kept an eye on her. But then she climbed up a tree stump and got stuck in a hole in it and I had to rescue her. My person was useless. She didn't help me at all. She just stood back and made me do all the work to extricate my sister from her unfortunate situation. She just stood back and took pictures of the scene. I'll blog about it one day and show you just how unhelpful my person was. The pictures are nice. But I think I would have preferred some help and my person could have helped in an instant. Sometimes I wonder about her priorities.
So that first day we just walked past the graveyard. It was raining quite a bit and we knew that after the graves we would come to a road. My person had looked on the map on her phone and spotted that there was a bus stop nearby. She had decided it would be better to stop walking, catch a bus, and go and get dry. No more adventuring for Blob Thing that day. I agreed with this decision. For once my person was being sensible.
We got to the road okay. We got to the bus stop okay.
And then we encountered a problem.
There were no buses on a Sunday. None. Not even if we waited for three hours. None.
What to do? In the rain? On a road with no buses?
The sensible thing would have been to walk up the road. It would perhaps only have taken us ten minutes and we would have reached another road. And another bus stop. With regular buses. Even on a Sunday.
That would have been the sensible thing. We stood in the rain and my person pondered what to do. Should she be sensible? Twice in one day?
She decided to be not sensible.
She decided the best thing was to carry on walking along the river. In the rain. With no jacket. Because that's just the kind of woman she is.
At the time I complained and asked her, "Why don't we just walk to another bus stop? It's only just up that hill." She said, "It's okay, if we go this way it's just another few miles and then we'll be somewhere I know we can find a bus stop."
So we carried on walking and in retrospect I am glad. We saw lots of pretty things that day - things we took Winefride to see too after seeing the graveyard. The rain didn't spoil the afternoon. But I did hide away in the bag quite a lot. My person didn't have a waterproof jacket. But I haven't even got waterproof skin.
We crossed the Irwell at the road and found ourselves in Bury. We're not in Salford anymore Dorothy. A sign announced that we were at the edge of Drinkwater Park. I didn't want to drink the water but I like parks. So it was a thing of gladness to find that our route entered the park. To be honest it wasn't in our route. My person knew where we were going. There was a signpost pointing to where we were going. It wasn't through the park. It wasn't even on the same side of the river. But the park sounded more fun, even in the rain.
We saw pretty things like this.
It might have been pouring with rain but I still wanted to take time to pose for a photo. I'm glad we've taken Winefride to the park too and she has seen what I saw.
We saw this plant. Cow parsley. I think, although it seems a funny name for a plant that doesn't look like a cow. It's very pretty. That's not to say that cows aren't pretty. I like cows and met some near another lake we walked to. But cows don't look like cow parsley. Unfortunately we saw a lot of another plant too and took photos of that. It was called giant hogweed. There's a lot of it there. The Wikipedia article about Drinkwater Park has a section about flora and fauna. The only photo there is of giant hogweed. Horrible stuff. This plant was much prettier. And much less evil.
We carried on walking and passed a wide flat area. It was still very wet but we were happy. I was surprised by how happy my person was being. She was having fun and being very obvious about her enjoyment of being outside.
The rain kept getting worse. I sat in the bag mostly and didn't even take time to have my photo taken. Not even when we got to this part of the river. My person had to jump from the river bank across a deep gap to the top of an old wall to take this photo. She did it again when we went back with Winefride and she took some very nice pictures of us there.
We reached the second of those bridges. It was time to cross the river again. The bridge once carried a canal but the canal had gone. The view was still there though.
We crossed and followed a tow path high about the river. It was very muddy and we could hardly tell it was a tow path because there wasn't much evidence that there had ever been a canal. Never mind. And it was very wet. The tow path seemed to go on for ever but I know that was just our imagination. Eventually we reached the end and reached our destination too: Clifton Park, back in Salford.
We didn't take time to explore the park, deserted because of the weather. There was only one car in the entire car park. We left the park quickly - it would still be there another day - and climbed up the hill back to a bus stop. My person was right. This bus stop had buses on a Sunday. Lots of buses.
And so we returned to the house and got dry.
All that was left to do was to drink tea and smile at what had been a very lovely day indeed.
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