Tuesday 15th November 2011

A bit late with my blog this week as we have been up to Scarborough again, to our flat.  As always a great weekend and lots of steps added to our total.  We tend to park the car and leave it as we can walk everywhere: to the High St. shops, to the theatre, to the museum and to the restaurants - very different to living in our tiny village where you have to drive everywhere. 

Saturday was a glorious day with a lovely sunset (photo) giving hope for a great day on Sunday but it could only be described as 

  'grey' - one where you can hardly tell where the sea stops and the sky starts.  We still went out of course - we drove 15 minutes south along the coast to Filey.  We  walked out along the spur of land called Filey Brigg, along the beach and then back through the lovely little town - of course stopping for afternoon tea!  Filey beach is 5 miles long, flat, with firm sand and is very wide when the tide is out and in 1903 it was used to test the first powered flights in the UK (photo).

Back in Scarborough it is great to be able to walk around the headland to the shops  A new work of art has appeared on the North Bay promenade that we understand is temporary and for remembrance weekend.  It is a huge sculpture of an old man, an ex-soldier, sitting on a gigantic bench looking out to sea.  His open arm and room besides him on his 

 bench invites you to sit beside him - we could not resist.  (sorry photo is on its side - I cannot make out how to turn it!!!!).  But the plaque on the bench bears a serious message.  It says:

They said for king and country, we should do as we were bid.

They said old soldiers never die, but plenty of young ones did.

So thanks to our weekend away our steps are still adding up and we have now counted a total of more than  2.5 million.  Over this weekend alone we have walked over 90,000 between us - that is the equivalent to about 23 miles each!

The donations are understandably drying up a bit.  But we are still very pleased with the amounts we have raised and we will not stop rattling our tins until 25th December!

More next week (it may be Tuesday again as I am off working on Monday)

Jean (and David)