Statue hunting leads to statuesque feelings

Week off for me !

I suspect with what my legs feel like after Friday, I'm going to need it to recover. Lots of Gromit hunting ....

Many, many Gromits.

I started on 16 when knocking off work on Friday and was up to 47 by the time I was ready to drag my weary body home. Oh and the phone desperately wanted charge too, I doubt whether it would have lasted to do the ones at the top of Park Street !

I especially liked the Oh Bollards in the middle, the Lego Gromit and the Gromitronic with the lights.

There's the Oh Bollards,

Lego Gromit and ...

Gromitronic with lots of flashing lights. The Feathertron 3000 was good too but was behind a very reflective piece of glass which I was having trouble getting a good angle on.

Too sunny ! It was a good day for Gromit Hunting on Friday. Despite skies threatening early (and a heavy rain shower while I was in work), it was dry throughout and more than a little warm. Forgot my water bottle again ! Oops.

I don't want to know how many miles I walked though. My legs haven't forgotten yet. I started feeling the effects of a calf strain halfway round .... which is where you ask if you've passed the point of no return (i.e. it's less distance to go forward than go back) and keep on going if you've gone past it. Which I had !

Bristol was putting its good side forward on Friday.

I could be living on one of those at some point in the future. Not one of those, my own barge !

The harbourside was being especially shiny.

Some lovely looking big ships out there today too.

The river, swollen by the earlier rain, was looking like chocolate. Hmmmm chocolate. The wind up there was also wanting to eat my hat. I didn't let it although I did have one hat chasing incident earlier in the day.

By the ending stages though, I was starting to question :

STAIRS ! Why did it have to be stairs ! I might have had maybe 10 miles in my legs at this point with a diversion to an off-trail Feathers and a little more diverting around.

I'm looking forward to a quiet week now with lots of music listening. The new laptop is arriving tomorrow, although I'm definitely not thanking the credit card company who I won't be advertising. They put a caution on my card due to me buying laptop. I don't make a habit of buying laptops ... It's odd that they flagged that and not the washing machine. Silly people. They should really check the IP address that a transaction is coming from and use that as their check if they don't have anything better to go on. In the event, it delayed another laptop related purchase and the card was declined at a coffee shop on Friday. Makes you think about switching to another card.

But ... Gromits ! How many so far ? Here's the map :

The green ones are the ones I've ticked off so far. Not yet for the red ones. Oh and there's a couple off the map to the SW as well.

I've quite enjoyed the Gromit Hunting this time around. It's getting me to see some things I never realised were around. It seems a little more commercial though. Last time with the Shauns, I think they were all outside and accessible 24/7. Most of them. This time though, more than a few are behind doors that get locked in off hours and Bristol centre still tends to run 9 to 5 for the shops. With the 2 at M Shed, I was lucky to get there when I did because I took those with only 2 minutes to go before they closed up.

Others were tucked away deep in shops. It seems a bit more commercially affected this time around which is a shame. They're in different places too, which is great. Means we get to see more.

Anyway, that's it from me for tonight. As always for these pictures, click for bigger. Except for the map and the montage, they're all full resolution from the camera. Camera has lots of pixels.

Status check - still not recovered from it yet, my legs still haven't forgiven me but at least I escaped the potentially more serious damage that was threatening from the calf strain midway around.

More later in the week perhaps !

PS Techie note on the montage ... Gimp crashed with the first attempt where I tried stitching them all together at native resolution. I had a feeling it would have trouble because the image was starting out at 4608x3456 pixels ... times by 30. So to make it work and make it easy, the working file was at the native picture resolution (4608x3456) and each picture was imported into its own layer. Layers make things very easy with the picture editing. Then ... divide each layer by 10x10 to make them 1/100th the size and memory requirement and use the grid align tools to arrange them in a 6x5 grid. Job done in 30 minutes perhaps. Oh and when crop the arrangement down to remove the extra unused space around the outside.