44 years old biologically and 27 years in my head… it was time for a trip.
The weather was looking good for Kielder. As it’s so convenient to get too and you can legally overnight car camp (make sure you pay, it goes towards maintaining the forest) it’s hard not to choose it as our home for the night.
We arrived later than we planned and stopped off at Bellingham on the way. There’s a lovely waterfall that’s only a short hike and it’s pretty cool.
We didn’t take any pictures as there were lots of people there. It’s creepy to whip a camera out when there’s kids jumping half naked in the water. Little shits spoiling my peace and quiet lol.
As karma for my lack of patience for children, my wife slipped on her arse which put a tiny bit of a downer on the majesty of the waterfall, oops lol. Look where you’re going ffs 😉 After dusting herself off (tough geordie) and trying to count all the mushrooms we headed to Kielder castle.
Once again we had the castle car park to ourselves and parked on the top tier at the far left hand side. This is a cracking spot for views. How much longer this will happen who knows, once the word gets out we expect it to get busy.
Setting up camp was much quicker this time as we both did it rather than just me (as shown on the demo I posted on YouTube). We’ve got it down to a fine art now.
We cracked open a bottle and kept our fingers crossed for clear sky’s. Yeah right… sure enough, it clouded over as did our brains with booze. All good though, this is the UK we don’t do clear sky’s.
It’s so quiet after dark. Just us and the resident owl that always goes nuts around 8pm.
After a good nights sleep we paid the small toll fee to access the kielder forest drive which is an absolutely awesome way to start the day.
The plan was to hunt down another waterfall, hopefully this time one without pesky kids ruining the vibe.
The other end of the forest drive (technically the start) has a small car park and that leads to a forest walk called Hindhope Linn and waterfall.
What a beauty. We highly recommend this walk! It’s not far as you can see from the sign above, so don’t expect a decent hike but it’s not one to miss.
Here’s the highlights.
We headed further into Kielder for a longer walk after leaving the trail for Hindhope Linn, just to get some miles on the legs before heading home.
Lastly, here’s some token information about the Jimny.
Fuel economy at the end of the trip. This is 2 people with a small amount of kit and the total roof weight was 67kg. (Since got this down to 63kg!)
34.7 mpg, I can live with that 🙂
Will some work on aerodynamics improve it? It’s worth a try, I’ll post more as I try different DIY methods for shits and giggles. At this point it doesn’t really matter but for some reason I enjoy tweaking and improving the set up as much as using it.
