Great Shaun Hunt Part 2

Thursday saw me go out hunting for Sheep again.

And it's taken until now for me to write the scribbles up about it ! Yep. Took a fair bit out of me, I don't think I want to know how far I walked in apparently only an hour and a half according to the timestamps on the pictures. I'm still stiff now from it !

Getting old, although to be honest, I always needed this kind of amount of recovery time after hitting the cricket pitches for the first couple of games in a season.

That's the final tally after finally sitting down for a little rest before heading back to the car (via a place selling cold drinks !), making 23 Shauns on the day. Which of course, is far too many to post all the pictures here. Or is it ...

Click for bigger !

That's sadly the 1/64th size version, reduced for the thumbnail. Gimp didn't want to export the full whopper of an 18432x20736 pixel image (coming in at 1GB!) to Gif and then Google refused to upload the 1/4 size picture. Boo hiss. You wouldn't have wanted to Click For Bigger on that 1/4 size pic, it was still 42MB as a GIF :-). Happy techie got to play with techie toys.

That's the 24 pics of Shauns I grabbed on Thursday. The first is Lily, who I first spotted on Friday last week but I needed a better picture of that one. I got away with it as far as the weather goes, we had some of the damp stuff in the morning and it was threatening rain again as the evening got closer. But in between, sunshine burnt off the humidity in the air and ... you may be able to discern crisp shadows in those pictures ...

Yep. Sun in Bristol. It's rare but it does happen sometimes.

See ? Blue skies there with only occasional cloud. And a boat. Two of the trails I did heavily involved Bristol's waterside.

Click for bigger again. The trails I did were :

Temple Trail off to the East in yellow. This one is 2.5km, although I did join at the middle at 66 and 67 and nearly ended up walking to Bath due to a wrong turn after the station.
Harbourside Trail in the middle in orange. This trail is 5km, also on the flat. Looks like I managed to pound out that 5kms walking in 1 hour 20 according to the timestamps. I'm pretty proud of that, it's good to be back to fairly unfettered walking close to the pace I used to be able to do.

And I picked up a couple of "I'm in the neighbourhood" randoms with a peek at another grand building :

That's Bristol cathedral, heading via the Hippodrome, before having a rest at

St Michael's Church which was hosting Honey Shaun.

All the photos are on Facebook so I won't repeat them here (apart from the montage monster!) but here's a couple more with some of Bristol's heritage :

Building of worship of POINTY THINGS ! Could there be a better thing to worship than Pointy Hats ? Hmm. I seem to be missing a pointy hat from my hat collection.

That's On The Waterfront Shaun, the other side of the river from SS Great Britain. I need to visit that ship sometime, 15 years in Bristol and it's another of the local attractions I've not visited.

If you're looking to visit the Shauns, there isn't much time left ... They disappear on 31 August when they go to auction to raise funds for The Grand Appeal, the Bristol Children's Hospital Charity. More info at the Shaun In The City link.

I may go hunting for some more on Friday, it'll be a great excuse to visit Forbidden Planet (it's near 27 and 28 on the map), which I've not been to for ages now.

I'm sore now (still!) but I'm glad I took the trip out to see the Shaun's. I'm getting older but it's a good reminder that I'm still pretty well able physically, even if the reactions are degrading to the level that cricket isn't an option any more. And having two achievements pop up without really trying were great for that "I'm not ancient yet" confidence :

Spring to the Finish - run the last 20 metres to an undiscovered Shaun. I was just walking (quick) ! Honest !
Bleating the Competition - complete any Shaun trail in half the suggested time duration.

Yep. Happy. If still tired and sore.