Thank you every one for patiently waiting for this, my 7th instalment.

My aim is to inspire & be inspired, to continue to be strong & continue to be confident!
I may be slow at blogging but that is only due to my MS. As with everything, I’ll get there eventually! 

After the massive trauma of loosing our boy ‘Jake’ we had to decide what we were going to do about the caravan holiday we had booked.

Were we to stay at home where the memories would be painful or were we to take a slow drive to collect the caravan and make our way to Somerset?

It really was a horrible decision but after hearing our youngest dog ‘Ollie’ pinning for Jake we thought it would be good for all of us to have a change of scenery.
We felt a little concerned about what people might think of us but it was our decision to make and it turned out to be a holiday full of memories!

As we were newbie hikers with all the correct walking gear we said that we would take it with us so we could do a lot of walking and it would be for Jake!
We took some of his fur with us and left a bit of him in all of his favourite places, this even included the stream that he loved to swim in just outside of the campsite.

We literally walked miles! Even though Porlock was a regular place that we  visited for our holidays we had never actually explored it much on foot before!
It felt like a real adventure for us, we bought some ordnance survey maps of the local area & chose the routes along scenic paths. The shortest walk was around 9 miles!

We certainly made the most of our time away! We even talked about looking at properties there, after all we knew we were definitely selling our house!
We didn’t make any appointments to look at properties but the seed had been sown!

We were about four days into the break and our friend came to join us for the weekend.
Unfortunately he didn’t bring any proper walking gear, so we carried on visiting our favourite areas by car. This was fine by me as a lot of the places we love were a bit too far to walk and by this time I was starting to get a slight limp because of the pain that started in my hip just before our holiday started.

We spent our evenings walking the lanes close to camp, not too far because of my pain and we didn’t need to go far for what we wanted to do!
For one of my birthdays I was given a ‘bat detector’ and an evening course learning all about the different species of Bats and how to use Bat detectors, we even went for a walk to hear the bats if we were lucky to find any!

I am very passionate about nature with Bats being one of my favourite creatures! I find them so fascinating! I can only describe the feeling as a great ‘buzz’ when I see a Bat and hearing them as well is incredible!
My partner was given an extremely powerful touch for her birthday so she could see Bats even from a great distance! We used to laugh about it as it could so easily be used as the bat light for ‘Batman’!
I remember we met a couple on the camp site who came with us on one of our ‘bat walks’ it was so nice to share the experience . The night they came with us was fortunately one of the best nights. They loved the experience with the bats and to learn so much about them!

At the end of the weekend it was time for our friend to go home.
Once he had gone we felt so lost, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves!
The next day we continued with our walks, again using the maps we had brought.
I’m not sure what day it was, all I remember is being half way up a wooded hill when the phone rang!
It was the vets to let us know that Jake’s ashes were ready to collect! Gulp! We weren’t expecting that! We should have!

We turned around and walked straight back to the caravan, packed everything away and left the next day!
We just wanted our boy back!