Famous Five at Quarenca

 I will let your imagination decide who might be Julian, Dick, Georgina and Anne but obviously we have only one candidate for Timmy the dog. Answers on a postcard however here are four of the now infamous five, Sue, Karen, Martin and Rafa the dog with, of course, Alan behind the camera.

We started promptly at 09:30am and headed down towards the medieval pathway out of the village.

At this point I started experimenting with a function on my camera called HDR (High Dynamic Range), it takes several images at once and merges them to optimise a range of potential camera settings. This was the first attempt.

As you can see it does produce quite a dramatic effect. There are other HDR images produced during the course of the walk and you should be able to spot them.

As we walked the subject of British history came up, particularly the absence of English nationals sitting on the throne of England. I must admit that it is difficult to justify describing any of monarchs of England as truly English since the battle of Hastings and the unfortunate King Harold Godwinson (Harold II).

I have been accused of being able to ‘bore for Britain’ when I get onto the subject of history and that kept us going until we reached a drink stop at the Fonte Filipe.

When the Famous Five arrived at Fonte Filipe we found that the Germans had got there first. There were half a dozen cars parked at the Fonte, some with German plates which suggested a German walking group has started there although we didn’t come across them during our hike.

As we turned back towards Quarenca we hit a few climbs on the basis that what goes down must invariably go up. As we did the rains on the previous day had left quite a few muddy puddles and these appeared to be populated by some jumpy little frogs.  

On the approach to Quarenca we picked up a small dog as an escort and three of the Famous Five helped themselves to freshly picked figs from many of the trees along the route.

At the finish, what better way to wash down the figs than a cold beer, wine or cider, well it wasn’t going to be lashings and lashings of lemonade!

My iphone calculated that we had walked around 12kms and climbed the equivalent of 52 floors or climbing the stairs of Canary Wharfe Tower.