Week #131 Yorkshire Dales 3 Peaks Challenge, birthdays and yellow sheep!

The summer so far has been pretty hectic and full of travel and adventure with our 3 long road trips so we have really enjoyed a quiet few weeks back in the Yorkshire Dales. We have loved just sitting and listening to music, catching up on some of our admin jobs and enjoying our lovely cottage. It still feels as if we are just on a little holiday in an airbnb in the Yorkshire Dales - I wonder if that feeling will ever go away? I hope not.

In this weeks blog we celebrate birthdays, complete the Yorkshire 3 Peaks Challenge and chuckle at the appearance of yellow sheep in the village!

Birthday Treats

I had a lovely Yorkshire Dales birthday starting with a visit to a fab local cafe, "Elaines Tearooms" in Feizor which has the most fantastic range of delicious home made cakes. We had a nice hike in the local hills and ended the day with pizza and a beer at the new restaurant "Rind" based at the Courtyard Diary cheese shop.

It was nice to just have a quiet day pottering around, the calm before the storm of going down to Cheshire for the weekend with a big family get together.

We had such a lovely weekend with everyone gathering at Lukes on Friday for a BBQ and a big Sunday Lunch at Mums and lots of fun and laughter in between. For many years we were all too busy to have big get togethers but over the past couple of years it is something we have done increasingly more frequently.

I love my birthday present from my sister - we had seen a 3D wooden map of the Yorkshire Dales advertised in Alpkit in Ilkley made by a local craftsman. It is so different to anything we had seen before and it is a perfect focal point in our cottage to look at and chat about where we have been hiking that day.

Progress on the subsidence

Richards mum has been in a care home now for nearly 18 months and as her Power of Attorneys we have been going through the process of getting her house ready to sell to pay for her care.

Sadly we have had ongoing issues of subsidence for the past year that the insurance company so far have been pretty good at resolving. It is a long drawn out process and has taken over a year so far. Hopefully the subsidence cause has been identified and fixed (leaking pipes). We have had 6 months of close monitoring where careful measurements have been taken every 8 weeks to ensure that there has been no further movements. We are now at the point where we had a meeting last week with a company that has been allocated to fix the damage to the actual building and then make good all the internal decorations.

As ever, life is not always easy, with the house being built in the 1960's most of the walls and ceilings are covered in artex which we never realised is a big asbestos risk and tests have to be carried out on the artex before they can commence the works! If there is asbestos in the walls then it is a pretty major job that will take alot longer. We just have our fingers crossed that it will all be completed by early spring so we can get the house sold.

Getting out hiking in the local area

We have loved being home and getting out for local hikes in the Dales. The weather has been very mixed but we have managed to dodge the storms and fit in some lovely walks.

One of my favourite places in the whole of the Yorkshire Dales is a hike out the back of Settle that takes you up to Victoria cave and Attermire Scar. I think it is just as scenic and impressive as Malham Cove with the most beautiful views in all directions and none of the crowds and traffic chaos.

We have also had a few fab hikes from the cottage discovering places we had never seen before. It is amazing what you can discover from your front doorstep.

Something we have come across on a couple of our hikes is yellow sheep?!? We are assuming they have been dipped for some treatment and that it is not a fashion statement but they do look very comical!

The trials of navigating the tax system... Extreme rant alert!

Being teachers, we have never really had to navigate the frustrating world of the tax system and self assessments. Something we did not realise is that we now have to submit a self assessment tax return even though we have earned only a fraction of our allowances in the 2023/24 tax year. Apparently, even if we had not earned a penny we would have to do a return so that the government knows where we are and what we are doing.

Because we have set up the Early Retirement Wanderlust YouTube and freelance writing together - we have to set up a partnership from which we can 'pay' ourselves. In theory this is an easy process that can be done online, but we couldn't! In reality we have spent probably 30 man hours on the phone and online to only keep hitting a brickwall with no where to turn to for help!! The Gov.Uk website is an actual joke! The phone system even worse - designed to make it as hard as possible to speak to someone.

Eventually we printed all the forms off and sent them by registered post. Our paper work was processed but 8 weeks later, when we spent another couple of hours trying to trace our UTI number - it turns out it had been sent but must have been 'lost' in the post. We started the whole process in Mid April to hit a deadline set by the government that our 'intentions' for an online assessment must be submitted by early October. We still do not have the 'code' needed from Gov.uk to do this! And all of this for a few hundred pounds of earnings that we owe no tax on!!! It is a shambolic system not fit for purpose - rant over.

Dental Disasters and Vaccinations

Half way through our European road trip Richard had a minor disaster and lost a filling off a tooth. Neither of us have been great at having regular check ups in recent years so we have had the task of trying to get a new dentist in the Dales. As predicted we have no chance of finding an NHS dentist, I think those days are now long gone.

Luckily, the dentist in Settle could fit Richard in at short notice and at a price - it is a good job we still have a little bit of a contingency pot for such things as it cost over £600 for a root canal filling and emergency appointment.

Something that I do worry about as a Nation is that this is a prohibitive cost for many families and many adults will not be able to afford to have any work done - for some dental hygiene could be like going back to the dark ages! I know for us, we have avoided going as we simply cant afford it at the moment.

To complete Richards week of joy and a very expensive Thursday, we also had to head into Keighley to get a couple of vaccines that are recommended for our Thailand travels - our local surgery were fab at sorting out most vaccines for us but they couldn't source the rabies doses needed.

At least once we have had the final booster - we will have coverage for the next 25 years - and I wont have to actively avoid the cute cats and monkeys if we see any!

50/50/50 Challenge

We occasionally like setting ourselves the odd fitness challenge when we are at home and this time I wanted something that would help get us beach body ready for our trip to the Gulf Coast in Florida.

If I am going to keep it up, it has to be something that doesn't take too much setting up and can be done anywhere. So this months challenge is to complete a daily work out of 50 push ups, 50 sit ups and 50 air squats. It is amazing how much this hurt for the first week as we had got out of the habit of strength work!

But over 2 weeks in and I can physically see the effect on my arms and stomach muscles - it's not hurting quite as much and I have kept it up as it is quick and easy to fit into our day!

We are going to try and keep this going for the next 6 weeks while we get ready for Thailand. I might swap some of the movements out and maybe add a little more to it as we get stronger as it has made us realise we do need to keep up doing some strength work.

Heading into our third year of early retirement!

We did have a celebratory glass of fizz last night as we officially started our 3rd year of being early retired! There was always a combination of dread and excitement as we headed into September when we were teaching.

I loved the buzz of getting my classroom ready for a new year and getting to know my new class. Everything feels new and fresh in September but we also used to dread that feeling of the long Autumn term until Christmas with very little time to ourselves for months at a time.

For the last two September 1st's, we have made sure we are away somewhere nice to mark the fact that we are not having to go back to school. This year, we decided being in our lovely new home in the Dales and going for a walk in the hills is a perfect way to mark the occasion and our new lives.

When we reflect back on everything that we have done and achieved in the last 2 years we feel a real sense of pride and fulfilment and we look forward to what the future may bring.

Ongoing BT WiFi Dilemma

We have travelled far and wide throughout Europe and the remotest Scottish islands this summer and have rejoiced in the wonders of speedy internet and phone signal. Then we returned to the Dales!

When we first moved into the cottage our wifi was positively awful - we are on the old copper wiring which is OK for streaming Netflix and browsing the internet but we cannot load even a photo onto instagram or facebook with out changing over to hotspot off our phones. It is a reality that we accept for living in such a beautiful place.

It took BT over a year to realise that actually there was a real problem with the line going into the house - at points they were recording over 1400 outages a day! A lovely Open Reach engineer has finally replaced the wire and our service is adequate - just.

We are at the point where we have to renew our BT contract which we will be bound to for 24 months again. Ideally we would have swapped to an EE Smart 4G hub at a cost of £50/month which is not cheap. However, we feel held to ransom by BT who keep pushing the EE hub as an option for us and are supposed to be partners in the same company but also want to charge us £7.50 a month each to keep our BT email addresses that we have had for over 20 years!!! So suddenly not so cheap. We are just keeping our fingers crossed that the governments fibre broadband promise that everywhere will have access to fibre by the end of 2025 happens.

The Yorkshire Dales 3 Peaks

I may go into more detail in a full blog on the challenge later in the week but this weekend we completed the Yorkshire Dales 3 Peaks challenge with Luke and Charlotte.

The challenge is to complete the 39.2km loop with over 1600m of elevation gain in a time of under 12 hours. We did it in 9 hours and 57 minutes so are feeling really proud of ourselves!!

It was a fab but very tough day which started at 5.30 as the sun was rising! Although we have not specifically trained for the challenge and we have not done many hikes that have gained huge amounts of elevation, we felt surprisingly fit, even as we scaled the last mountain!

We were really lucky with the weather which was sunny and 20 degrees with a nice breeze on the tops to keep us cool. There were literally hundreds of people completing the challenge and there was a great atmosphere amongst the hikers. It was great chatting to different groups of people about their motivtions for doing the challenge. Most people were raising money for charities close to their hearts.

We celebrated with a well deserved pint at the end and returned home to a preprepared feast of shepherds pie - absolute comfort food before retiring to bed by 9pm with very tired legs!

Our next blog will come from the USA as we fly out for a couple of weeks of family time in Florida. We love the fact that our adult children still enjoy spending time with us - enough to sacrifice 2 weeks of their treasured holiday allowance. We are looking forward to some quality family time with my Mum and all my sisters family too.

We have just released our final Orkney road trip blog which includes the northern lights and a fabulous few days on Westray and Papa Westray - see link below

Finally, I have got the blogs back up to date!

Have a great week

Jackie and Richard xx