Dahlgren Trail Half-Marathon

| edwinridout

2013-02-24 08.09.23

Sunday morning at 8am I was in wave 7 for the start of the Dahlgren Trail Half-Marathon. The tracks only continue a couple of hundred yards, and for the rest of the 6½ miles this was very pleasant running indeed. The landscape is entirely rural, mostly through woods, with only two or three places intersected by country lanes. Most of the sleepers (ties) must have been removed, although in some sections of the trail they were simply rotting away by themselves. The grade was not quite as level as I’d expected, although I might have been imagining it to be mostly a gentle uphill climb on the way out and continuing gently uphill on the way back. I ran a 9:18 pace and finished at 2:02:08, taking home my first ever road race prize as I was 2nd out of 4 (!) men over 60. (I was also 24th of 48 men over 40.)

2013-02-24 13.11.26

Here’s the website of the trail preservation group: http://www.friendsdrht.org/DRHT_TrailInfo.htm

124 Argyle Road

| edwinridout

As seen recently on Google Maps from St Stephens Ave:
124-Argyle-Rd.Google-Maps.1-3-2013.strt.800
Built about 1900 maybe, Wena’s birthplace, the Roberts home for sixty years. Not in frame was a renovator’s sign, Project One. Changes since we knew it: the front garden gone for parking of course, with new entrance on St Stephens Ave. Also gone, both the side door to the street (you can just make out the new brickwork where the door with no doorknob used to be). The nearby door in the wall permitting entry to the back garden is also gone. So is Ieuan’s motorbike shed, revealing either an extra window or a new door to the scullery. (And are those two kitchen windows new? Otherwise Ieuan’s shed would have blocked them, and I don’t remember that.) Definitely new since we were there, perhaps replacing the leaky old scullery skylight, is a vaulted skylight perhaps providing light both to the scullery and the dining room, probably a very nice idea. And there’s a new skylight above the back bedroom. Not in frame here, but a rather fuzzy view on Google seems to show an almost derelict garage at the bottom of the back garden, with an entrance from St Stephens Ave. The satellite view of Argyle Road at this point shows the strikingly straight row of perhaps twenty houses, presumably all the same except for this, the only one with a turret (above the master bedroom, which Ieuan said was the coldest, draughtiest room in the house). This house was said to have been kept by the builder for himself. I think Granddad must have bought it on his schoolteacher’s salary about 1920. It sold in 2002 for £700,000.

Fifty years ago

| edwinridout

Pics from the Queen Mary just before docking at Pier 90:

2013-01-20 20.03.21.huddled-masses Also see Gareth’s animation on his website.

2013-01-20 20.05.00

Here’s what we had been doing earlier:
cn-letter
(No direct response to any of those messages has yet arrived. However I did hear that year from a boy in the north of England presenting himself as an officer of the International Bottle Club.) Assuming the four-hour time difference and the coordinates were correct, I certainly got the London time wrong — it would have had to be four hours later, not earlier. And I was mistaken at that point about being in the middle of the Atlantic. We were almost there! Here’s what Google Maps makes of those coordinates today:
n-atlantic

Here’s where we’d stayed the night before we sailed from Southampton:
star-hotel