By: Blonde One

Here are some of the reasons that I go to Dartmoor for a walk:

  • To fill my lungs with some fresh air
  • To keep fit
  • To practice my navigation
  • To explore new parts of Dartmoor
  • To revisit old favourites
  • To find antiquities

These are the main reasons but I was pleased to be getting out with Blonde Two recently for an entirely different reason …

Over the last few years my little orange bag that contains all of my walking treats has become rather full. Not full of gorgeously tasting delicacies you understand, but full of bits of this, bits of that, and old old chocolate bars. I decided that I couldn’t possibly eat them at home; that would be entirely wrong. I had to eat them when I was on Dartmoor, which is the location they were purchased for. Blonde Two and I had fun (!) exploring the depths of this bag and enjoying the wide range of best before dates that we found. The oldest was August 2015 but there was a date on a bag of peanuts that was so old it had rubbed off, so who knows what it was. Mostly the food tasted ok but the pistachios were rather soft and the salted peanuts needed to be renamed as no-salt peanuts.

Blonde Two has a legendary malt loaf in her bag as part of her emergency rations (it would indeed have to be a dire emergency to get me to eat it!) that she has pledged to keep there until it is 10 years old. It has just over 8 years to go. As she has previously said she also has some sensible emergency rations too but when walking with Blonde Two my advice would be to carry your own emergency rations or to eat mine which are now replenished and well within date!

It does seem to be a long standing tradition of getting my bag ready for a new season (although the old one doesn’t actually end anymore, it just blends into the new one) as the preparation is all part of the fun.