Drying off

We went to Birchen Edge, I couldn't see the point of driving further when it was set to rain later.  It's a fair walk to the crag from the car park opposite The Robin Hood pub and we were almost there when I realised that I'd left the guide book in the boot of the car!

I left my rucksack with Mary, who sat down by the path and said she might have a little snooze for the 20 minutes it was going to take me to go back and get the guide... actually she was woken up pretty soon by some climbers who wanted to check that she was ok, so she reckoned she only had forty winks  :-)

I'd decided which route to climb and we were having a coffee when I found that my phone - my new phone received only yesterday - wasn't where it should have been in my pack....  We both set off back to the path to try and find it, but then Mary realised that it would be helpful to have her phone so that she could ring mine!  While I'm searching the bracken at the side of the path Mary's back at the crag ringing my phone... and it turns out to be in my sack, not in the top pocket where I put it, but right down at the bottom - she'd had to empty everything out in order to find it.  Hurrah, I was very relieved!

Then we climbed the route, which was good and a bit balancy near the top, but by the time I'd set up the belay for Mary to climb it was mizzling quite strongly. 

We ate our sandwiches at the base of the route, see extra, but the rain became more persistent and so we packed up and walked back to the car. But never mind we'd done a route and had extra exercise running up and down the path to the crag, and the main thing from my point of view was that last Tuesday's nagging helpful advice from C was cancelled out as I proved to myself that I could trust my feet today.  Yay!

Once home I emptied my bag out so that everything could dry off.