Not so Isolation Journal 132

Annoyingly I woke up at 6.30am and my alarm was set for 7.10am and so I didn't fall back to sleep again and we'd been up until around 1am looking at our childhood vaccination records online.

I went into the office again today for the morning, Alan is still uncomfortable with me going into the office with Covid cases rising, I find I'm constantly torn because I do feel that the office is very much as Covid safe as it could be and I feel less cluttered and more focussed when I'm around colleagues, but I totally get that it feels very unsettling in terms of the fact Leeds it currently Tier 2.

I had a meeting with colleagues, did a handover and caught up with people and then headed back home shortly after 12.20pm and it took me around 30 mins to get back.  I wanted to be back to see how Alan had got on at the nurse appointment, but it wasn't hugely productive.  She just looked in his ear.  I had some carrot and coriander soup and a pannini for lunch and logged back on .  We did a BD session and I managed to clear around 250 emails, but had 400 to get through and I've got a load more stuff to get through, it's relentlessly busy again.  I also had a last minute client meeting with 3 clients at a company which was pretty useful.

I booked the first week in November off as leave and signed up and paid for an Arvon Course which I'm really looking forward to.  I have also ordered a book by each of the tutors Wild by Jay Griffiths and Addlands by Tom Bullough They are both more nature and landscape, which isn't directly relevant to my novel, but is something that I'm really interested in.

I ran a candidate search until around 8pm and Alan made dinner which was pulled chicken burgers and I then had 2 ice lollies.  

We watched Taskmaster and tried to go to bed a bit earlier.

Isolation Journal 131

I woke up later than I'd hoped today, messed around on my phone for too long, but did manage to read around 50 pages of Girl Woman Other and then got up and made some scrambled eggs on toast for a late breakfast.  

I had just enough time to go for a quick 30 minute run and noticed that my right knee is a bit sore, but at least my Garmin now has my training status now as "improving".  My friend Hannah rang me whilst I was out for a run, but I had to ring her back later!

I then very quickly showered and signed onto a crafternoon zoom call with my friends Alix, Sam and Hayley a few minutes past 1pm.  Jenny also joined us a bit later.  I started work on a babygrow for my friend who has had a baby called Willow and started to make a Willow embroidery on it.  We chatted away for hours and I suggested we could try and get a Goat to join us for our call, but unfortunately even though the booking went through for £5.99, they didn't spot our booking and the goat didn't make it.

I messaged Hannah after the crafting and had a catch up and then after that call I went to do some tidying of the kitchen and sorting out of my kombucha that has turned into vinegar, took out the recycling, got scared when a mouse Alan had put in the bin started rustling around (clearly not dead).  I made some carrot and coriander soup and also made as start on a Hello Fresh recipe for tea, but fast concluded that the pork that went off 2 days ago was definitely not edible and so I made orzo pasta instead and used up some onions, mossarella and courgettes.

We watched Taskmaster and then also ate lots of crumble.

Isolation Journal entry 130...but definitely missed at least 2 weeks!

Today I woke up really early as I needed to drop my car off to York Audi for a service at 8.15am so my alarm went off at 7.10am and I left about half an hour later having fed the cats, eaten a banana and drunk a coffee and made one to go.  I also cleared out my boot in the hope they might clean it (I later discovered they aren't valeting cars at the moment due to Covid)

I listened to "With me Now as I drove and I was about 3 or 4 minutes late, but the traffic wasn't too bad  at least and I'd taken "Girl Woman Other" to read as well as my phone to entertain me.  I dropped off the key and the chap was wearing a mask and sat behind a screen and pointed out a socially distanced area to myself to wait, but I suspect it wasn't all that well sanitised as there was spilt and dried up coffee all over the table.

I noticed after over an hour my car hadn't moved and the chap explained that it was because the workshop entrance was blocked, it did eventually go in about 10am and so I went for a walk around the Clifton Moor escape with an idea I might go to Costa for a coffee.  It was a 20 minute walk and I listened to an audible book that I'm using for research for my novel Don't you Know Who I Am? when I got closer I popped on my mask again and had a look and there was a queue out of the door for both Costa and Greggs and as York is Tier 2 alert level I decided not to risk it and walked back to the dealership, but dialled into the weekly parkrun "Virtual Opposite" call and caught up with people which was lovely.  I saw my car return and my battery was down to 10% so I left the call and after a few minutes I was able to get my car back.  I picked up some bad news that one of my close friend's husband has come down with Covid and is having to self isolate with the family, it's really not what they need after a stupidly challenging 18 months.  I hope they are doing ok.

The car passed it's first MOT with a small advisory on corrosion on brake discs which Alan had told me to expect as it's been sat on the driveway a lot and not moving.  I drove back and let Alan know I was on my way and called my Mum and Dad for a catch up.  I got back in time to eat a very odd lunch of an almond croissant, cinanmon swirl, left over kebab and curly fries from last night and also a rocket lolly - I definitely need to eat better food!

We watched the first episode of the new series of Taskmaster which genuinely had me crying with laughter during the "egg" challenge - watch it you will thank me!

I had to nip out for my Drive Through Flu Jab and time it so I arrived at exactly 2.07pm and it was literally a drive through where I showed my letter, was given a token, put on my mask, drove to a tent, wound down the window and without a moment to prepare jabbed in the arm!  It was certainly efficient!

I got home and watched the rest of Taskmaster and then fell asleep on the sofa and watched some Great British Bakeoff.

Alan cooked sausage and mash and cherry crumble for dinner which was really delicious.  and we watched more Taskmaster and then when he had a bath I watched some Extra Slice.

Not so Isolation Journal - Managing to use our wedding gift Yurt stay...

The past 2 weeks have been quite exhausting with work and so I've struggled to keep things up to date, but I wanted to properly document a lovely trip away that we had to Swaledale Yurts.

When we got married last September, Alan's lovely work colleagues had bought us a few lovely gifts including a voucher for a 2 night stay at Swaledale Yurts as well as a voucher for a meal at The Ivy and a voucher for Alfresco Adventures.  In February we got organised and booked in things like the meal and booked our yurt stay for June not thinking for a minute we would end up where we are now.  Swaledale very kindly moved our booking back in June to October and we were booked for a Friday and Saturday night and had confimed our included hot tub session for 9pm on the first night.

Being more organised than usual the weekend before I'd checked the website for Swaledale and seen that there was a shared kitchen and bathroom facilities, but that you could have hot evening meals and breakfast delivered to your Yurt and you could also order packed lunches if you wanted to.  We decided to order for the Friday evening two portions of steak stew with dumplings and then two shepherds pies for the Saturday night.  I ordered croissants for breakfast for Alan and a bacon baguette for me and a cafitiere of coffee and two orange juices for both mornings.  I emailed our orders over, but on Thursday I'd not had an email back which was unusual so I'd emailed again and had a phonecall straight away from Michelle (one of the owners) to confirm the food was all fine and booked us in for 7pm for our evening meal.

I packed the night before because I knew that my work was going to be full on for Friday and that we'd need to leave at 5pm as it was only 70 miles away, but through lots of cross country roads and estimated around 1 hour 40 to drive to Keld.

We ended up leaving slightly later than planned as I had so much to finish off at work and we didn't have a chance to stop at Wetherby Services for drive through coffee and the sat nav had our ETA at 7pm so it was tight!

Alan drove us up the A1 and then we ended up heading past Catterick Garrison and through loads of windy and hilly roads (I was pleased he was driving, especially as it started to get dark).  We had no mobile phone signal for around 40 minutes, so I couldn't even ring up to let Swaledale know that we might be a few minutes late.

It was just about on time when we arrived (about two minutes past 7pm, very grateful for an accurate sat nav and postcode) and Michelle met us and told us that she'd taken our dinner out of the oven in case it burned.  She pointed out where our Yurt was which was the furthest away from the main barn (and the best location in my opinion!) and it was the blue yurt.  Alan parked up the car and we unpacked and the yurt was lovely and warm with an electric heater plugged in to warm us up.

Moments later our dinner was delivered and it didn't necessarily look as we'd expected - two very substantially sized pyrex dishes with stew and 4 chunky cheesy dumplings on top and they were delicious!  Warming on a cold and rainy night and very flavourful.  I didn't know if I'd be able to finish all of it, but we both did!  We'd brought a bottle of fizz with us, but I'd not spotted we'd need a bottle opener so Alan had to use my nail scissors to dig out the cork and we enjoyed slightly corky sweet fizz out of white mugs.

We set up the bed for the night as there were two single beds with additional beds underneath that you could move next to the single bed to make a double.  There was also a sofa as well as a dining table, 5 chairs a coffee and tea making area ledge, a small fridge and a boot tray.

We then got ready for our hot tub and put our swimming costumes on and some clothes and head torches before heading to the hot tub near the barn.  It was very dark and remote and we got out of our clothes and into the hot tub and Alan turned on the jets.  It's worth mentioning that it felt very Covid secure as there were loads of hand sanitiser points everywhere and lots of space, so even though some of the facilities were shared, we didn't feel worried at all and everything was kept very clean.

Spending nearly the full 90 minutes in the hot tub we listened to the water jets in the hot tub and the waterfall next to the site and watched the stars in the very dark sky.  It was also fun to watch the cars driving along the windy road and their headlights bumping up and down.  

Getting out of the hot tub and was really cold!  We got dressed again quickly and headed back to the Yurt and got into our warm pjamas and tried to get the DVD player working on my laptop, but it wasn't working and so we watched a bit of The Terminal and put a log on the little log burner inside the cabin we were really warm so I turned off the heater and until the morning we were warm enough.

The alarm went off just before 8am the next morning so that I could be awake to take in our delicious breakfast delivery which came on a tray.  Alan enjoyed the croissants that smelled delicious and came with plenty of butter and jam and I ate a white baguette with bacon and lots of ketchup and HP sauce.  The coffee was good and the orange juice made it feel less unhealthy (i.e. at least we had a fruit involved).

It was pouring with rain and so running to the toilet was a mission and it was nice to be cosy back in the yurt listening to the rain thumping down on the roof.  We had a nice after breakfast nap and then woke up and it was stil raining so we opened up the new game I'd bought a few weeks ago and played Sagrada which took us a little while to work out the rules, but was suprisingly quick to pick up and became very addictive.  

As it was still raining hard, we planned our walking time for later that afternoon to avoid getting too wet and so had some cheese, bread and jam and crisps for lunch.  At 2pm the rain had finally calmed down.  We took a look at the maps provided in the guest book and took some photos and headed off up hill first crossing a bridge to admire the strong flowing water that was going behind our yurt.  

We were roughly following one of the routes in the guest book in the Yurt, but in case we got off course we used my Garmin watch to navigate with really good GPS which allows the "navigate to start option" as with no map, compass or working mobile phones we wanted a back up option.  

The first bit of the walk was really steeply up hill and some cyclists giggled as they spotted a rather aggressive 4x4 car ground out on the road.  We took the footpath and walked the ridge behind the yurt site and enjoyed some lovely sunshine as it broke through the clouds.  We didn't pass too many people in the first part although did pass a larger group of people walking all drinking lager and playing music as they walked and then got to a waterfall section with a bench where more people were drinking Red Stripe next to the river.  

It started to rain a little as we walked on and we passed an abandoned building that I had a look in and also an old tractor that was part of the landscape after many years.   After getting to a point where there was a totally stunning waterfall that almost looked manmade we decided to go back the way we'd come in case the rain got heavier.   

On the other side of a ridge we thought we'd spotted a railway track, but when we took a slightly different route back to Keld we discovered it was this strange path, maybe used by a quarry?  It was really steep!

We got back to the Yurt and decided to check out the private waterfall behind the bunk barn and it was really loud and powerful!

It was around 4 miles in total and I tracked it onto Strava

We settled back into the Yurt and got out of our damp clothes and warmed up and then at 7pm our next dinner arrived - delicious shepherds pie, it doesn't look like much, but was completely delicious!  

I had some red wine to go with it and also heated up apple juice in the communal kitchen for hot apple brandy and dialled into a zoom call for the launch party of a fellow parkrunner George Webster's short film S.A.M. (I had to watch it later as it was a bit hard with little WIFI or phone signal) and I also went back a bit later to heat up milk for hot chocolate although tragically discovered the hot chocolate tin I'd packed in actual fact contained loose tea!

We put a couple of logs onto the fire to keep us warm and went to bed and had a lovely night of sleep.

In the morning it was lovely blue skies and I got up to use the bathroom before coming back to have breakfast that again was delivered to our yurt door.  We had the same as the day before with croissants, a bacon baguette, coffee and orange juice.  

Realising that there was another way of looking at the waterfall, we went around the front of it and it was even more stunning with the sunny morning and hopefully if we ever go back in the summer, we'd be able to do some wild swimming if it's not too powerful!

We paid the bill including an extra log for the fire (you get one complimentary log per night and then it's £3 per extra log) and were really pleased that our voucher had included not only the evening meals, but also a few other bits and so there wasn't as much to pay as we'd anticipated.

I came to the conclusion over the weekend that sometimes in a very stressful and increasingly digital world a bit of time away from phone signal and constant information is really good for my stress levels and mental health.  I thought about Maslow's hierachy of needs and weirdly even though you'd think being further up and having all needs satified would be ideal, it was actually nice to have to focus on the more basic needs of keeping warm and dry for a bit  I also think that the smells of grass, bracken and the outdoors do something to my brain that really calms me.  It was a happy coincidence to be there on World Mental Health Day  

It would have been a different experience to visit in June, we could most certainly have gone swimming, but the Autumn has a special feel to it and it also reminds me of when Alan & I first got together and had our first glamping trip to a tree lodge at Swinton Bivouac.  

Swaledale Yurts has extremely good tripadvisor reviews and I can definitely see why, I really hope that we get a chance to visit again at some point.