I Am Splitting Today's Post,

into 2 parts, 

the first all from Diana's telephone, the second post from my camera, as my camera takes an age to download and edit, so for today we were off early,

driving for about an hour or so, 

to Cliffe Pools a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds wild life preserve, we were meeting up with the Bromley RSPB, I would have put a link to the RSPB, but for some reason I am not allowed to see it, every time I try to look at it I receive the message "Service Unavailable" back to Cliffe it is a reserve of over 1,700 acres, there is a lot to walk around!

we all meet in the car park, 

I was soon snapping away, 

I had bought Diana a pair of binoculars, 

some of the members had also brought spotting scopes around for us all to look through, which was kind and very thoughtful, to see the birds that were mere spicks though my camera lens in such detail and close up through one of these scopes was amazing,

all set for the off, 

I forgot my hat, so a hood it was, at first it was more than a tad chilly, 

but with these almost clear blue skies, 

it soon warmed up as we made our way to the estuary of the River Thames, 

in the distance a long disused coaling dock,

one thing was soon apparent as with my visit to the Sevenoaks Nature reserve, 

my 100 - 200mm zoom lens even with a 1.4 converter was not up to the job, looking around and chatting to other photographers in the group a 400mm lens was a minimum, with a number of the people there having 500 or 600mm lenses plus a convertor, 

at lunch time there was a break, we had not brought a packed lunch with us so we started our walk back to the car park, as we left the group we learnt that we had walked 3.5 miles and we had another 1.5 miles to walk back to the car park,

at this point only a mile to go! we arrived home famished, 

so a read and a sherry, 

for our starters a huge crisply vegetarian spring roll, 

which was delicious, 

for our main course a roast chicken, with gravy for Diana sans gravy for myself, 

'Cheers!', after our meal it was feet up for some television, in the evening as there was nothing we particularly liked we decided to spend our evening with Poirot, after which Diana was off to bed, for myself a Shed & Buried before I too was off to bed.