First off, Stewart Ramsden, one of our walk leaders was invited to the Ramblers' 75th birthday party held on 2nd February 2011. It had been postponed from last December owing to bad weather. Stewart Ramsden with the wonderful Julia Bradbury, our Queen of Walking! Manchester and Salford Ramblers - News from our Members
Our members are an interesting lot!: the following is news about some of their doings.......
Stewart describes the event:
"I arrived at the Ramblers offices on Albert Embankment (the building is sandwiched between the MI6 building and a police HQ) about an hour early, so I got roped into helping with the preparations: pouring out glasses of wine, setting out crisps and making coffee. Other guests trickled in and before long the offices were packed. I chatted to Ramblers staff, other members and Get Walking Keep Walking Volunteers, mainly from the London area.
Short speeches were given by the Chair of the Board of Trustees, then Tom Franklin, Janet Street Porter, Simon Barnett and Julia Bradbury, who then cut the very large, and delicious, birthday cake. (See the picture for proof)
I left about 8pm and walked back to Euston to catch my train back to Manchester."
Next, Les and Liz Jones featured in the newsletter of the Ramblers Worldwide Holidays describing how they like getting a genuine insight into the people and societies of the places that they visit via the Ramblers Holidays.
Full details of the article have been scanned in here. You may need to use your zoom button to read it clearly
And then we have that Stewart Ramsden, again, one of our walk leaders, who was invited to Windsor to visit the Queen in November 2010, for his involvement in 'Rural Communities in the United Kingdom'.
As Stewart comments "What an amazing evening - I never dreamed I would get to meet the Queen."
A full report from Stewart is available here.
Stewart has let us have 2 pictures to whet our appetites- one, his'official' portrait taken by the Press no less, and the other, of all the guests at the reception St George's Hall. Stewart can just be spotted at the extreme left of the picture, just below the plinth of the fourth bust ( Stewart's own words:"look for a very white head"!).
Official Portrait
Where's Stewart? Spot him at St George's Hall
Another user of the Ramblers Worldwide Holidays, the photo below showing Stewart was taken during a two-week hut-to-hut walking holiday in the Dolomites in northern Italy, in July/August 2009. This was a Ramblers Worldwide Holidays trip, graded at C+ and it involved a lot of scrambling using fixed ropes, etc.
Silhouette Hikers
The photo was taken early on day 8, shortly after leaving Rifugio Boé, which at 2,871m (9,417ft) was the highest hut of the trip. Shown are Alan Rimmer from Blackburn at the front and behind him is our own Stewart Ramsden.
The photographer was Steve Warr, who was the walk leader. The photo was classed as Highly Commended in the Austrian Alpine Club’s 2010 photo competition and is to appear in the autumn edition of the AAC newsletter. The photo was originally entitles “In the shadow of Piz Boé” (the 3,162m/10,371ft mountain we had climbed the previous day), but the AAC renamed it "Silhouette Hikers".