Lost!

With yet another beautiful day on the cards, today's plan was to be out of the house early, do an 8 mile walk from the village of Barthomley and then have lunch at the excellent pub there.
It all started off well, and we were walking by 9:15, but that was as good as it got. Either the local farmers have rearranged the fields or the narrative in our guide was badly wrong, but we ended up completely lost in a large field. Tom also picked this moment to have a complete paddy.
If it had just been us, I would have blamed it on poor map-reading, but we ended up with another hiker who was equally perplexed. Eventually, we asked a local resident who sent us on our way, but it soon became apparent that she had no idea where she lived. At this point we gave up and navigated our way back to Barthomley by the noise of the traffic on the M6.
This meant that we were back at the pub 45 minutes before it even opened, so we cut our losses and headed to the village of Marbury (near Whitchurch), where we remembered having a good pub meal once before. The grub was good this time too, but we found ourselves sharing a bar with a crowd of complete in-breds. I tried to see how many fingers some of them had, but I couldn't count quickly enough. There were also 3 old ladies at the table next to us who had clearly had several sherries too many each and threatened to drag me up for a dance. To cap it all, the (very well-upholstered) barmaid was wearing a ridiculously low-slung dress which left NOTHING to the imagination when she reached down to pull a pint. Strange morning.

We then drove home and spent most of the afternoon in the garden doing not much. Tom sat very happily in his Bumbo seat, I read some magazines and drank home-brew, and Jodie kept jumping up and annoying us.
We managed to squeeze in a couple of the races from today's MotoGP meet before giving Tom his bath and his bottle, then had dinner in the garden.