Thanks everyone.
We did it! 8K around an absolutely stunning park in brilliant sunshine with 500 other walkers all supporting AS. I am definitely going to do this walk again next year, so hopefully maybe I will be able to cajole a few people from TP into coming along, with proper notice.
One of the first things I noticed when I arrived was a trestletable with a pile of Talking Point flyers on it.
Our esteemed Moderator Grannie G and her late husband Dhiren's faces were beaming out benignly from it. I felt very at home.
I'd like to say Buddy was extremely well-behaved all the way through, but to be honest I would be stretching the truth to say so. At the start of the walk the organisers had brought along a Zumba expert to get us all doing a bit of Zumba by way of warming up before we set off. It's a bit hard to do Zumba, I found, with an excitable collie beside you and we sort of stepped to the back and let others get on with it. People were jigging and sashaying around and waving their arms in time to the Zumba music and all of a sudden a lady next to me pulled a horrified expression and indicated in the direction of Buddy, whom she was trying to pull towards her.
The reason for this was that Buddy had mistaken the backleg of one of the Zumba-dancing participants for a tree trunk. ( Need I say more?) The original lady and I both dragged Buddy away and I noticed with some alarm that a photographer was swanning around taking candid snaps of people. I do hope she didn't catch Bud in the act.
I don't think the tree-trunk legged person was aware of the outrage that had possibly been committed because they were wearing quite thick shell suit bottoms. I'm hoping they were waterproof. I THINK we managed to yank Bud away just in the nick of time. He has never done this before. Honest!
Anyhoo, moving swiftly on, the rest of the day was completely fine. Just a gorgeous place to be with loads of like-minded people all. Probably the best bit for Buddy was the fact that the man who was running the burger stall took a shine to Bud and fed him left-over sausages at the end and gave us a box of sausages to take home. What more could a dog ask for?
