{"id":410,"date":"2012-04-05T07:57:22","date_gmt":"2012-04-05T07:57:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/martinblack.com\/?p=410"},"modified":"2012-09-28T21:33:28","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T21:33:28","slug":"night-hike-along-the-ouse-to-little-thetford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/2012\/04\/night-hike-along-the-ouse-to-little-thetford\/","title":{"rendered":"Night hike! Along the Ouse to Little Thetford"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I walked my first ever night hike. \u00a0Obviously, I’ve walked in the dark before but this is the first time I’ve purposefully set out on such a journey.<\/p>\n

One of the benefits of living out in the sticks are the wonderful skies on a clear night and I’ve often stopped in the centre of Paradise playing field on the way home from work on a winter’s evening and gazed up at the moon and stars.<\/p>\n

For night hiking it’s best to take a route one already knows, so the Ouse river bank up to Little Thetford was an easy choice, it’s kind of hard to get lost with the river on one side, there is, of course, the danger of stumbling into the river but I felt confident that wasn’t going to happen. \u00a0Also, there is a bench at the Little Thetford moorings where I could sit and drink a bottle of beer and enjoy the night in relative comfort.<\/p>\n

Here’s what the moorings look like in the daytime<\/p>\n

\"Little<\/a>
Little Thetford moorings (image by Hugh and borrowed from http:\/\/www.geograph.org.uk\/photo\/2799093)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So I set off at about 7.30pm, picked up a bottle of Greene King IPA bitter on the way, and was on the river by 7.45.<\/p>\n

The sun had set some time ago but there remained a strong glow in the west. \u00a0A slither of the new moon shone above,\u00a0followed\u00a0closely by a bright Venus and fainter Jupiter. \u00a0I took a few photos but they didn’t come out that well.<\/p>\n

\"The
The night sky over the River Great Ouse<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the interesting things about the hike was the tendency for my mind to start spinning scare stories, i.e. being ambushed by the mad Ely axe murderer or hoodlums in general but this was easy to deal with when noticed and actually became quite funny after a while.<\/p>\n

By 8pm it was dark, though not that dark. \u00a0There were lights from the trains on my right and cars on an A road half a mile to my left. \u00a0Farm lights and other such enterprises contributed to the light pollution. \u00a0Most of the noise was provided by birds, either singing or flying or landing on the surface of the river. \u00a0The most noise came from two angry swans, facing up to each other for a late-night ruck.<\/p>\n

I arrived at the bench, opened the beer and stretched out full length with my rucksack as a pillow. \u00a0There were two boats moored-up, I saw a curtain open in one, the occupant looked out at me, probably a little\u00a0suspicious, perhaps I was the mad Ely axe murderer mentioned above?<\/p>\n

I drank from the bottle and looked up into the sky, toasting Luna and her lovely sister planets and stars. \u00a0I thought of some lyrics from a Pixies song:<\/p>\n

“when you look at the sky in a poetic kind of way
\nyou know when you grope for luna.” (Subbacultcha)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With the last drop of bitter finished I noticed the temperature had dropped somewhat. \u00a0I slipped into my jacket, pulled the rucksack on and, whistling\u00a0a Charlie Parker tune, began the walk back home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I walked my first ever night hike. \u00a0Obviously, I’ve walked in the dark before but…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[36,44,32,42,43],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1441,"href":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions\/1441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/martinblack.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}