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The 2016 Walking Season
arrives at its end. |
So we made it through 2016, one of the worst years in living memory, indeed perhaps the worst year that I have lived through and the temptation to not bother looking backwards is pretty strong, especially as my walking season is already starting to feel like a bit of a failure, so the major point to consider about 2016 must be,
Was the Walking Season Successful or Not? If we start by breaking down the list of projections for the walking year, made last February, the year did not come around all that well, with only a couple of targets coming together relatively easily, notably the completion of the Yorkshire Wolds Way and my regular targeting of the city of York, but many others being relative failures. Some more paths were struck around Leeds, as promised but none at all were made in Bradford, going unseen for the entirety of the year, and similarly, paths were made around Lower Wharfedale as scheduled but no attempts were made to break to the north in the direction of Harrogate and Nidderdale, despite having the strongest of intentions to travel out there. The most notable failure of the season was the social aspect, utterly failing to get my colleagues out onto the remoter paths of the county, finding that trying to get a disparate bunch of people involved is a lot like herding cats, and making no effort at all to get any of my friends out either, finding that I prefer the solitude of the trail to having to force some sociability out of my soul. Even worse, I made no attempts to do any walking in Lancashire, only getting over for one night to celebrate Younger Neice's birthday, and only getting together in the Hope Valley because My Sister willed some social interaction with the whole family in the late season, the lack of effort on my part for the year has been frankly shameful.
