When we reached Beaulieu, the others plodded on while I stopped to take a photo.  After all, it really is quite a beautiful place.

As I stood still for a quiet moment and took in the view I heard my wife calling me.  There was a sound of urgency in her voice.  I turned and looked.  She was standing on the pavement a couple of hundred feet away.  The traffic had stopped.  She was looking at me wide eyed, beckoning frantically.  She called again.  There was something in the road.  A large lorry was at the head of the queue of cars.  I couldn’t see the kids.  All of a sudden I realised something was wrong.  I sprinted over.  My GPS at this point registered 10.9 miles per hour against an average of 2.3 miles per hour over the day as a whole.  You can see the spike in the graph HERE.

My wife was standing on the pavement to other side of the road.  I turned my head in both directions quickly, choosing a small gap in the still-moving traffic on my side and dashing over.  Where were the kids?  All of a sudden I saw them, standing next to my wife.  A flash of emotion pulsed inside me – relief that my kids were safe, yet a split-second, passing sense of anger that there had been any suggestion that they were not.

Of course, there had been no such suggestion.  I had misinterpreted my wife’s frantic gestures (misinterpreting Deb’s gestures is a speciality of mine).  What she was waving me over for was this photo opportunity:

Phew!

Such is daily life in the New Forest…

Points on this part of the walk (copy and paste the co-ordinates into Google Earth):

• Cow in Road:  N 50° 49.152 W 001° 27.075
  

Walk #69 Statistics (of which this post forms the fourth part):

• Date of Walk: 14 April 2014
• Walk #69 total distance covered: 16.91 miles
• Coast of Britain Walk Total Distance Covered: 593.35 miles
• CLICK HERE FOR LINK TO INTERACTIVE MAP!!!