Road trips. Medal for cycling. That Last Supper thing.

 Yesterday my daughter and I went adventuring with the small people. Ideally we would have set off quite early in the morning but my daughter and Granddaughter Number Two had dental checkups in the late morning. Any hopes we had that leaving late would mean that the motorways would be less busy were just that - vain hopes! We never actually came to a halt but we slowed down rather more, and rather more frequently, than we would have liked. Consequently the outward journey took a good deal longer than our return journey later in the day.

For the first part of the journey it was like a flashback to when I had to chug along in slow moving traffic every weekday morning on my way to work in Salford.

But yesterday we by-passed Salford and continued westward. 

We were on our way to the Red Squirrel reserve at Freshfield/Formby.

We saw no squirrels. Instead we told the children tales of squirrel adventures in our past while we ate a picnic lunch. 

Then we prepared ourselves to tackle the sand dunes and get onto the beach where there was some splendid kite-flying going on. 

We could see the Welsh mountains and an impressive wind farm in one direction and a very faint Blackpool tower in the other. There were lots of people on the beach but nothing like the crowded conditions I saw in a recent photo of Brighton beach where it looked like standing room only.

The small people messed about in “lagoons”, hollows filled by the incoming tide, or possibly left by the outgoing tide. The water was positively warm. My daughter and I joined them and we walked down to the tideline, where the water was also warm. It’s the Irish sea of course, so always warmer than the Atlantic. This is the sea I remember from my childhood. But I read recently that the sea all around Great Britain is considerably warmer now than it was a couple of decades ago. Climate change. 

As we left the beach, I spotted this Hitchcockian moment near the carpark. 

Was this start of an attack on the ice cream van?

Now, I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist commenting on cycling some more. I mentioned wet roads for the time trial. One cyclist ended up in hospital as a result of speed cycling on slippery, wet roads. Australian Olympic cyclist Lucas Plapp in hospital after crash on slick Paris road | Paris Olympic Games 2024 | The Guardian

And today I see that Tom Pidcock has won a gold medal for us, for mountain bike racing! (When did a wild kids’ adventure activity become an Olympic sport?) I read that he was booed, something to do with having rushed through a space to overtake a French rider, I think. Such, I guess is the nature of mountain biking. I also read that he saves all his winning bikes, race numbers and winning jerseys! 

Then there is that supposed “Last Supper” representation. According to one source, it was not the Last Supper at all but a depiction of an ancient Greek Bacchanal, because, of course, the Olympic Games originated in Greece. There you go.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!