Despite the best of intentions, I’ve yet to spend any meaningful time working on the visual design and layout of this blog. The default ‘Kubrick’ theme that comes with WordPress is of course clean, subtle, and eminently suitable for a fledgling blog. Without considerable care and restraint, I could quite easily wreck things as they stand (though of course, I do have backups — more on that some other time).
I’ve made a number of tweaks to this blog since it started life as a vanilla WordPress installation a month or so back. I’ve focussed most of my attention on culling unnecessary links and widgets, and adjusting basic page elements such as the footer and single-post page layout.
Other changes I wanted to make fell outside the default features available from a self-hosted WordPress installation. Enter “plugins” — tools to extend the functionality of WordPress.
Most of us that spend a lot of our leisure time in the outdoors end up developing wide-ranging interests that complement our chosen activity. Many become adept at identifying the resident flora and fauna, perhaps even specialising in a particular taxa. Other rich seams of interest include geology, industrial archeology and human history in the landscape, and photography.
A month ago, I enjoyed my third day out on the hills to the east of Bridge of Orchy. This group of five Munros, and Beinn Dorain in particular, must be among the most eyeballed in the Highlands, with the busy A82 and West Highland railway line both skirting the western edge of the range, giving the passing traveller impressive closeups of stream-riven slopes climbing to 1000 metre-high summits, and furtive glimpses through lonely glens into the interior.
Well, it’s been a bit quiet on this blog over the last couple of weeks. It’s not that I haven’t been up to anything interesting — rather the opposite really. I delayed my summer holiday a little this year, and followed a long weekend in Scotland with a few days at home in Cambridge, and a week’s trekking in the Vanoise Alps.
Munro bagging can be hard on the knees. A combination of sodden ground, steep tussocky slopes, and strong winds took its toll on Saturday. The round of Beinn Achaladair and Beinn a’ Chreachain was a great, if tiring, day out. Twelve miles, and 1300 metres of ascent & descent in rather mixed weather (for which read rain, wind, and cloud), had left me with a twinge in my left knee — one I’ve come to recognise as the beginnings of ITBFS. If ignored (something I’ve done too often in the past), this rapidly becomes debilitating, and puts the hills out of bounds for a good six weeks. Not what I want with a trip to the Alps lined up in the week ahead!
It was back in 2005 that I took my first trip to Africa. A copy of Jack Jackson’s “The World’s Great Adventure Treks” had inspired with a chapter on trekking in the Drakensberg mountains of South Africa, so, a year-and-a-half into a new job, I decided to treat myself to a “big” holiday.
I booked a trip with Exodus Travels that combined a five-day guided trek along the Drakensberg escarpment, with a few days in the Kruger National Park tacked on at the end. With travel and day-trips included this was a two-week holiday, with the trekking being the main event. Or so I thought.
A chance set of circumstances lead to a magnificent (but very long!) day’s trekking on the Kepler Track — one of New Zealand’s best “Great Walks”. This illustrated article reveals the delights of this splendid (if over-engineered) track.
In an earlier post (“Customising WordPress — a plan”), I briefly discussed WordPress (the blogging software on which WildVista is hosted), and suggested that I was going to get out the pencil and paper, and start sketching out some design ideas. What’s actually happened, is that I’ve spent more time writing posts (probably no bad thing), and tweaking — oh OK then, playing with — various plugins, widgets, and my default theme.
I’ve just enjoyed a very relaxing weekend up in Derbyshire, staying with friends on the south edge of the Peak District. It never fails to amaze me just how much of the Peak I’ve yet to explore. Having been based in Nottingham for seven years (first at Uni, and then whilst working at the Railway Technical Centre in Derby), the Peak was on my doorstep (albeit a mighty 25-mile step) for long enough to have made countless day and weekend trips to this, Britain’s first national park. And yet there are still huge swathes that I’m pretty much a stranger to.
I was coming to the end of my fifth day of trekking in Kahurangi National Park, New Zealand, with another three days to go. As with most of the trekking here, shelter is provided by conveniently spaced, unmanned backcountry huts, but you need to carry all the food you’ll need for the entire trip, as well as everything else necessary to look after yourself while travelling through the bush.
In a little under three weeks’ time, I’ll be catching a train from Cambridge, and starting the long journey north to Tyndrum. I’m giving the sleeper a miss this time. Not only is it pretty much fully booked (six weeks ago there were only 1st-class berths available), but I’m also not yet fully recovered from the soul-destroying process of trying to obtain relevant online fare and timetable information about the service. I think I’ll save that particular story for another time…
Now, this was what I’d call a pretty typical spring day in the Highlands. Scudding clouds were unleashing regular bouts of cold, spiteful rain. The wind was getting up. Looking up the length of the loch, towards the mountains I’d set out to climb, I could see the ragged cloud base was fixed at about 600 metres. No place to be without the right gear, alone.
On more than one occasion, I’ve embarrassed myself my mislaying, forgetting, or otherwise losing track of some important item or other, resulting in unwanted stress, and potentially costly reparations. Driving off having left my walking boots behind in the car park at “The Green Welly Shop” (and yes, it’s been rebranded as “The Green Welly Stop” now) at Tyndrum is a particularly fine example.
If you’ve taken a look at the About page for this blog, you’ll see that I recently purchased a copy of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I say recently — I’ve actually been using the software for a good three months now. Still, I’ve a huge amount to learn and, as of last week, I think I’ve come across my first major stumbling block.
So, the WildVista blog is finally up and running. WordPress is ridiculously easy to install, and thus far, I haven’t come across any insurmountable problems. Actually, I haven’t encountered even the merest hint of a snag. Everything’s made sense, and everything’s worked. It’s early days of course (as the vanilla layout has no doubt already tipped you off), but so far, everything in the WordPress garden’s rosy.
2009 has been a good year for Scotland so far. By which I mean I’ve taken more opportunities than of late to make the long trek up to the Highlands from Cambridge, and get out into them there hills.
First off was a very mixed week based at Corran — a minuscule settlement of perhaps five buildings, clustered around the slipway of the Corran ferry. Visiting Scotland for an extended holiday is a meteorological lottery at the best of times, but if your chosen week falls within what’s technically the northern hemisphere winter (20th/21st December to 20th/21st March), the odds of a “win” are somewhat stacked against you.