A walk in the park...

Another foggy start to the day. The sun shining through the fog makes it very bright .By ten o'cock though it was blue sky and off with the jackets in the sunshine.

We had already chosen our day’s excursion to Morden Hall Park. We could have gotten the train there via the Northern Line, but decided that as it was such a nice day it would be nice to be above ground. So we caught the bus. The run took us more than an hour but we weren’t in any hurry and it was nice to have a look around from the top deck of the bus. I was pretty sure that we hadn’t been through some of the areas, but The Man has an amazing geographic memory and he said that we had. He was of course right as I finally did recognise the place we ended up. We had been there before. There is a nice café across the road from the bus top and as it was getting on to lunch time we thought that a repeat visit was in order and we were not disappointed. All day breakfast, mine with baked beans and The Man’s without.

So, fuelled up, we began our walk to the park. Not far and pretty soon we walked in through the gate. The information I had downloaded was obviously a little old as the waterwheel had been restored. We pottered around the grounds of an old mill. There were two huge millstones on their original mountings displayed on the grass outside something called the old snuff Mill

What was an 18^th century farmhouse is now a pretty garden centre complete with café. After a walk through and admiring the garden furniture and ornaments we headed out and continued on through the park. Plenty of picnicing families scattered across the lawn like so many clusters  of flowers. 

We stopped for a while and watch a couple of dogs larking about in the river. The owner was throwing rocks into the the water and the dogs each had their own method of finding them. Big Brown dog belonged to the deep sea diver club. Searching head underwater until it found the right rock. Big Black dog on the other hand, or should I say other paw, was of the touchy feely ilk. I did wonder at first why it was walking backwards, until I realised that it was feeling around on the bottom for the right rock. So with rock located each was keen to take their find back to the owner for a rerun. Big Black dog made us laugh even more as it got out of the water wanting to shake the water off but only able to manage a full body waggle while it was still holding the rock. Of course the shake went into full shower mode when it dropped it.

We walked to edge of the park where we discovered a tramline running right along the perimeter. Now that we were out of the park we were also out of printed directions. Hmm do we turn left or right? Right won, as we had glimpsed a big read bus at the end of the street.  At the intersection was a handy street sign pointing us in the direction of the nearest train station. From there it was s short run to Balham and then onto a southern rail train and in less than half an hour we were at Crystal Palace.