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Jimmy assured me he could remember the quickest route back to the M1 from
Wendover Woods G/CE-005, so I trusted him and
followed his directions. When we hit the town of Dunstable, I realised he had
been faultless with his navigation this time, and we were soon heading north on
the M1. VHF radio accompaniment came courtesy of Touch FM 107.6 and Raw FM
102.4, giving a website of www.raw1079.co.uk
on the (illegal) scrolling RDS displey. It didn't seem to take long at all
to get up to our target of Junction 22, and we realised that we were making very
good time, despite our relaxed approach to the day. Jimmy insisted on directing
me via Copt Oak to approach the Vercor Close parking spot from the north. As we walked outwards on the bridleway, also know as the "Ivanhoe Way", we
noticed two men ahead walking slowly with black sticks in their hands. We
wondered what they were doing. I speculated on water divining, while Jimmy
through they were dog leads. As we got closer, we could see that they were guns.
They said that they were hunting for pigeons and squirrels to make a pie with!
We passed them as the path turned to the left, but looking back a minute or so
later, we could see that they had been joined by two police officers! There were not any replies to our calls on S20, but we broke an existing QSO
on S19 to get the four contacts each. As two of these were SOTA chasers anyway,
that was not a problem! After leaving that net back to its frequency, a clutch
of stations followed me to S18 where I worked down the mini-pile-up. This
included Graham G4JZF completing his set of working us on all five CE summits in
the weekend, and Steve 2E0KPO who was able to inform me that the storm was 25
miles to my East, and heading in a direction that would not hit me.
All the same, it was nearly 5 o'clock local, rather cold, and the end of a
long and tiring weekend. No more stations called in, and it was time to go home.
It took us 20 minutes to walk down the hill, and a further 1 hour 45 minutes to
drive to Macclesfield via the A50 through Stoke. Jimmy and myself took dinner at
the excellent Weston Balti Raj on our estate, and yet again saw a certain G3CWI,
someone obviously pleased with our recommendation judging by the amount of times
we see him there! |
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