Bring me your poor, your huddled masses. 3 March 2013

Off through the spring-time road carnage – dozy cyclists and end-of-financial-year emergency road-works all over the place – to the exotic outdoor landscape of... Leicester.  Well, why not?  It’s where an awful lot of our members live, and there’s walking to be done, if you have a native guide.  Our native guide started us off, on this occasion next to the Statue of Liberty, which has shrunk a bit, pinged across the Atlantic and now lives on a roundabout.  We have no idea why, and look forward to imminent plans to recreate the Eiffel Tower over a pelican crossing in Melton Mowbray.  But, it was certainly quite a change from a field full of mud.

Walking by the river, canals and flood-plains did get us to some mud eventually, and Watermead Park was happily supervised by a plastic woolly mammoth as ever.  We were chalking up a good count of random monuments by the first ice cream stop, that’s for sure.  Then came lunch part one in a pub, a diversion past the space centre to see the most ornately crafted Victorian pooh pump still in full running order, and lunch part two in a café surrounded by goats, just after discovering the remains of a huge medieval abbey.  What with that, and a moment to explore where Leicester’s castle once stood, we have to give our native guide full points for variety!