FNRttC March 2011 - Southend

It's Thursday evening, I'm home alone, the parkin is in the oven and I'm beginning to visualise the first FNRttC of the season. I'll be going to Hyde Park Corner via Brentford and Waterloo tomorrow night, just for a change. I'll head out of Waterloo towards Big Ben and then Buckingham Palace.

Long evenings in the winter, waiting for the first FNRttC to happen, produces this kind of work: Lost in Translation - very funny!

And TimO produced this map (I believe). We're going to follow the blue route. Double click to enlarge.

Over 100 entrants! The forecast is looking quite reasonable, but I'm going to wrap up warm. I wonder how many 'Is this for Red Nose day' questions we'll get en route.

This morning, Friday, a wonderful email came through from Simon:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds. (from Bleak House, by Charles Dickens)