Holidays are over

I don’t know if I was missed, but there are probably a few people wondering what happened to CQHQ in the last few weeks, so a quick note to say I am back.

I was almost forced to take a holiday when my boss said I needed to use up my time off that was carried over from last year. I amounted the equivalent of to two weeks off and when I mentioned it to Helen she had a similar amount of time owing. It was however all a bit last-minute as her boss was not sure he could spare her over the busy Easter break. In the end he relented and we had the two weeks to coincide with the school holidays.

We arranged a week in Devon and a week in Dorset. The plan was to do some walking, some SOTA and some visiting. I wanted to do two SOTA summits in Devon and Cornwall that I failed to do two years ago because of bad weather, but I was thwarted again by even worse conditions, which included snow on Exmoor and lots of rain accompanied by high winds. We managed one SOTA that week on the first Sunday but even that was curtailed by rain after three-quarters of an hour.

The second week was better. A better house and much nicer weather. We managed five more SOTA activations and took time to visit about eight National Trust Properties amongst other things.

Driving home we took advantage of fabulous weather and did two SOTA activations on our way home, which made a pleasant day out of a long drive.

Details of my SOTA activations will appear on the SOTA reflector and on my website in the near future, but as I have eight activations to log, eight reports to write and several hundred photographs to sort it may take a while. Mean time I am back in work with my nose to the grindstone feeling a little less stressed and planning my next holiday to give me something to look forwards to.