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Saturday was largely spent catching up on sleep (i.e. in bed).  But I had a really super idea towards the end of the day (i.e. too late to actually carry out said good idea)... I could walk to work.

Right now I live in a town/village called Yately, which is the other side of the A30.  Each day my drive takes me along Cricket Hill Lane and Minley Road to work—in total the drive is almost four miles.

I had a go at sketching a route with Google Earth, Google Maps, etc. before finally asking my Dad to have a look for me (as the shops were shut and I couldn’t pick up a decent OS map).

He plotted roughly the same as I’d come up with in Google Earth, but of course the OS maps have much more information—public footpaths, bridleways and other useful details.

Here’s a very quick estimate of the route using Google Maps… it’s largely inaccurate, but it gives a good idea of the route.  Up top is where I live and Guillemont Park is down at the bottom right.

With the map sorted I drove to work at 4PM yesterday and proceeded to walk home.  There’s a really handy pass-operated gate to get out of the carpark and into the area surrounding Hawley Lake.

Two hours and fifteen minutes later, I arrived home.  I must have covered five or six miles on Sunday, thanks to my utter inability to follow a map.  This isn’t entirely true, as in the woods around Guillemont Park it is very easy to get lost—if you’re on a bike it’s no big deal as the area isn’t that large, you just backtrack and set yourself right.

But on foot you can spend quite a while… but the bigger problem is that you come out at the wrong area, and your whole route is now buggered up.  On Sunday I ended up at the Blackwater A30 roundabout and had to walk back up the A30 to make the crossing over the road into the carpark.  Here I got lost again and ended up taking a slightly different (longer) route home.

With all of this in mind, I set off to work this morning at 6:50AM, thinking it would take me at least an hour and a half to two hours.

In reverse (and with a little knowledge of) the route is much more straightforward.  As I do the suburbia sections first, I’m guaranteed to hit the entrance to the wooded area at the right spot, which makes getting through it much more straightforward.

All in all it took me one hour and ten minutes to get to work—an improvement of well over an hour.

Tags: Travel, Work

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