A - Z Challenge 2024 - W is for Walking

This year I'm blogging about my local area.  

My area?  Highams Park which is in the borough of Waltham Forest in North East London, (UK) a little known place that nestles between Chingford and Woodford that most people only come to if they have a specific reason to - if not we usually get bypassed.  Suits us.

Having lived in Forest Gate in East London for 36 years (and for my husband 65 years!) moving was a big deal for us.  But we've been in Highams Park since September 2020 so I feel I know enough about it now to fill out 26 posts! 

We've only moved just over 5 miles but we didn't know this area at all before moving here.  Although of course we did have a good look around when looking for a house and there were a number of things we wanted on our check list.

Places to walk was high on the list - I love getting out to walk.  Often I walk alone and I like to listen to music - I use Spotify to generate a walking playlist where the tempo of the music keeps me walking at a fairly steady and quick pace.  Not fast, but just not an amble either.  Of course sometimes I walk with Hubby but that's definitely at a slower pace.  I like to convince myself that by walking regularly I can at least slow down the aging process.  I don't obsess about doing e.g. 10000 steps a day but I do like to keep a good average going.

Of course just a walk around the lake is a good mile and a half and with Epping Forest on our doorstep there are lots of walk we can do.

Thanks to all the rain we've had it's been tricky walking around the lake as it's been so muddy but we walked the circuit on Sunday and it wasn't too bad - still not ideal for nice trainers but fine for old ones and it was fairly easy to avoid the really muddy patches.

When it's really wet and muddy I tend to do a loop incorporating the park which at least has tarmac paths or if all else fails there's always a Leslie Sansone video to follow on YouTube