SOMETIMES when you build your expectations too much they can quickly be shattered.

Like New Year’s Eve, it’s meant to be a good night out but so often it’s average.

The Old Poets’ Corner promised so much.

Tucked in the picture postcard village of Ashover the pub has won bucket loads of awards over the years.

Just last month it was runner-up in a nationwide search to find Britain’s best local pub of the year and it has a hat-trick of CAMRA awards to its name.

From the outside the pub looks pretty ordinary and arriving we started to wonder whether we should have believed all the hype.

But stepping inside on a bitterly cold winter evening it became pretty clear why this pub is a favourite.

Three fires were burning in the pub and the place was packed with walkers in their hiking boots, families on a night out and even folk enjoying a pint with their four-legged friends.

via Derbyshire Times

Guest post: 46th birthdays, 46 peaks

I climbed my first Adirondack High Peak in July of 2002 at the age of 37 with borrowed hiking gear and brand new LL Bean hiking boots. I had just moved back to New York after spending 10 years in Boston chasing an unfulfilling corporate career and was

Our pilgrim's progress to Santiago de Compostela –aboard a bus

You get used to the sight of them soon enough: men, women and older children in hiking boots, rucksacks and a seemingly ubiquitous walking stick. They traverse on foot through wheat fields and roadsides, on bikes in the highways, sometimes in packs,

Former homeless woman now coordinator a Norwich soup kitchen

Jarmon and fellow case manager Ben Green often hang out in downtown Norwich, looking for familiar and new faces. Sometimes, Jarmon, who has short hair, a brisk walk and an air of street confidence, pulls on hiking boots and walks along the railroad

The great outdoors

So get out the bike, lace up the hiking boots, slather on the sunscreen and explore. Hike, camp, paddle -- even portage with a canoe -- at Lebanon Hills Regional Park in Eagan and Apple Valley. The hilly 1842-acre wilderness is the largest park in the

The road less traveled to Machu Picchu

but both were beset with trailside mishaps: Travis when his foot caught the edge of a sharp rock while swimming in a glacier lake , necessitating the attention of the ER doctor, and Yvette, whose hiking boots disintegrated on the soggy trail.

At 14,100 feet, summiting Pike’s Brim is a challenging triumph, even if you’re driving to the top.

Dialect mayhap I should have listened to the partner who checked us into the Garden of the Gods Campground.  She suggested that we take the school to the acme rather than confront the problematical route, but having practised to push on the submerge and winding mountain roads of the Virgin Islands, I intellect I was up to the stimulation.

So what if this mountain was a small taller, alright a lot taller in the great in extent altitude uninhabited than any hill in my Caribbean native, how perplexing could it be to plunge?

Tollgate – 8,000 Feet Above Sea Play fair with

At the access to Pike’s Nib, we picked up an audio expedition of the leave on CD, and we were on our way.  I enthusiastically praise this 50 instant program.  It entertained us all the way up the mountain, and gave a engrossing overview of the mountain that inspired “America the Well done.”   We practised all about this mountain, from its Ute Indian inheritance to all the many unearthly and wacky ways that people have found to acquire this climb (including the man who pushed a peanut all the way to the top with his nose.  Yuck.)

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