By: Blonde Two

If you think carefully dear Blondees and Blondettes, you may remember that one of our Blonde Exmoor missions earlier this week was to find some useful roads that were suitable for Blonde minibus driving.  Picture the scene; Two Blondes, a Freelander, a Gold practice expedition route card (written by the youngsters) and a virgin 1:25000 map of the unexplored territory that is Exmoor.

As it turned out, more problems were thrown up by the prospect of Blonde minibus not-driving than anything else.  It would appear that those in charge of Exmoor only want around 30 vehicles to be able to park across the whole National Park at any one time. This was fine in February as I think we only saw five other people walking but I suspect that we will not be the only minibus seeking out spaces in July.  We eventually managed to find some suitable parking spaces and the map (so traumatised by its experience that it already has a hole) is now marked by strange hieroglyphics.

Anyone listening to us driving around would probably have laughed.  We counted passing places (not that many), we tutted about holes in the road (plenty) and we uttered not-so-ladylike words (we didn’t count).  The first place that we had to find was a farm campsite.  There were three options of roads going into it and, being Blonde I managed to choose the least minibus friendly first.  To be fair, neither of the other options looked very pleasing on the map.  One was called “The Tunnel” and the other had lots of those funny “steep road” symbols on it (we later realised that most roads on Exmoor have these).

We should, maybe have been warned by the sign which said that the road ahead narrowed to 6′ 6″ but we had little idea of minibus width despite a discussion about a very tall friend and his ability to sleep across the front seats of one.  The road did, indeed, prove to be narrow and the number of passing places didn’t require more fingers than those which are usually available on one hand.  The icing on this particular “not-in-a-million-years” cake though was a bridge called “Silly Bridge”.

 

You can see from the photo that we did the fingernail test and that even in Blonde One’s Freelander, there was only room for one hand to stick out of the window.  Endearing though Silly Bridge was, we won’t be testing out our minibus expertise on it in July.