My regular readers, all two of you, will notice the distinctive gap in proceedings where some microadventures should be. As a life long organiser I was fairly convinced that I could plan a monthly adventure into this year but, to misquote Woody Allen and several world religions, women plan and the gods laughed. Possibly because they had seen my diary and knew they already had some dates with me:

The Work Gods

The main problem of having a job that you love is that you often can’t tell the difference between work and not work so you end up with many weekends that could be classed as either, depending on who you are justifying the activity to. I reflected on this in March when I ‘worked’ every weekend, spending most Saturday nights at the cutting edge of cycling campaigning with this woman in hotel rooms (see why hotels here) across Scotland in matching #walkcyclevote hoodies.

The Wet Weather Gods

The Work Gods kept up their interference into April, then handed over to the Wet Weather Gods. The tone was set as I decided not to take the bikes on our planned camping cycling adventure in Ballachulish as the Met Office was indicting a canoe would be more suitable. This was one of the very few photos taken outside for fear of my phone being swept away in the raging torrents water pouring over the west coast of Scotland.

The Hot Weather Gods

May arrived and I fled with my girlfriends to the heat of Seville. I can never be ‘too hot’ but I do appreciate camping in the extreme heat can have some drawbacks, so the budget was blown on an apartment for our post-We Walk, We Cycle, We Vote drinking cycling expedition to Seville. This adventure into Europe’s poster child for quick urban cycle way development has already spawned a Storify, two different blogs and a proper article so I really don’t need to elaborate further. My only contribution to the documentation of this trip is this photo, showing exactly what happens when wifi is restricted to a small area outside the reception of a hotel inhabited by cycle campaigners just after an election:

The Gods of Comfort

My husband already tolerates me and (what he perceives as) my quasi-religious love of cycling, so asking him to cycle and camp on his own birthday weekend – my only free weekend in June – seemed abit much. My beloved prefers the finer things in life so to preserve some notion of comfort the duvet was duly packed with our family tent for the less wild alternative to the microadventure – a mini adventure to the Kirk Yetholm campsite in the Scottish Borders. It’s a lovely, quiet site with basic facilities and a great local pub within crawling distance and, based on the two visits we’ve made, the sun is always shining there.

The microadventure strikes back

I did squeeze an almost microadventure into May, claiming it was ‘work’ to my husband and giving both Sally Hinchcliffe and I something to write about by surrendering my GPS in return for a paper map and compass. Oh, only I didn’t write about it. My lovely new tent, the Vango Banshee 300 if you’re interested, finally got its first outing with my neglected Dawes Galaxy along the backroads of Dumfriesshire. The local roads were gloriously quiet, the D&G CTC crew throw an energetic ceilidh and Scottish summer visited us in all its four day glory, giving me the impression that the gods might have finished giving me a hard time.