I’ve been blogging about hiking and running on various platforms since August 2011. For the first few years, my blogs focused mostly about hiking in Wales – and occasionally over the border in England. There was a lot of rain, mist and – my biggest bugbear – mud! Then, in November 2019, we left the UK to live in Portugal and I found myself blogging about hiking in warm and sunny climes, about keeping going in extreme heat (The Alpujarra, Spain in July and August was a killer) and exploring a new country.
Blogging about hiking is much like keeping a modern-day diary or journal in that it provides a lasting memoir of your own life; it also means that on those grim days when it’s impossible to venture outside, Harri and I can log onto my blog and reminisce about the seventeen years of hiking adventures we’ve shared.
Somewhere along the way I decided to dip my toe into the field of travelogue writing, which is not very different to writing a blog, especially when you’re as long-winded as me!
As well as blogging about hiking, have now published three ebooks (also available as Amazon paperbacks):
- Never too old to backpack: O Fôn i Fynwy: a 364-mile walk through Wales
- The Via Algarviana: walking 300km across the Algarve
- More Algarve hiking
From 2024, I will be expanding the scope of this website to include my venture into fiction writing. For several years I’ve been chewing over an idea for a book set in my home town of Newport during the unforgettable summer of 1976 (at least for those of us of a certain age). I finally finished the first draft in November 2023 and will be tackling the various rewrites early in 2024. I have no idea whether the final novel will be publishable or not, but so far I’ve enjoyed the writing process.
But back to the main focus on this website – hiking. Over the next few months I aim to start upgrading the website. This will include:
- A general re-organisation of the website – and the removal of older ‘dud’ posts
- Adding PR routes we have walked in the Algarve and in Central Portugal with our feedback and photographs (and, when possible, adding links to our GPX)
- More about current and future writing projects
So if you love hiking and/or writing, why not stick around for a while?