LD Staff Head for Secret Test Location

Last weekend pretty much the whole staff team from LD headed into the depths of the beautiful Northumberland landscape for some gear testing and “team bonding”!

Not a bad spot for the night

Many thanks here, to all at Whitley Bay Explorer Scouts, who have maintained the fantastic location above for many years and who agreed to let us use it and also the folks at Prendwick Farm whose land it is on

That’s most of the climb done!

Loaded up and probably carrying too much

Northumberland at its best!

Armed with sleeping bags brought along by Andy Green from Mountain Equipment, who joined us for the night, and a selection of tents from MSR, Fjallraven, Nordisk and also rucksacks from Lowe Alpine those not working Saturday headed to the cottage during the day either on foot or bicycle with the poor souls plus Margot, Wim’s dog, who had been working in the shop following on later.

Nearly sorted with the overnight accommodation

Just need to decide who is sleeping where

With all the tents erected in what was quite a strong wind, which gave us the opportunity to discuss the merits or otherwise of how easy they were to pitch, Jon (our resident chef), who you might have seen in action in our TGO Blog, did us proud with a fantastic meal of lamb cooked in the wood burning stove, flatbread, giant cous cous, coleslaw and a salmon option for our lone veggie. Actually Neil did quite well out of that!

If LD did camp food it would be the best in the world! Probably

Nothing like a real fire to lift the spirits

After a couple of small Wainwrights, beers that is not hills, and probably too long putting the world to rights, we retired for the night with our chosen sleeping bag to our allocated tent.

At least Margot is raring to go

The Wainwrights seemed to do the trick and after an all too brief nights sleep the Sunday shop team were up and away by 8am for a brisk hour’s walk back to the cars and on to Newcastle for our ten o’clock opening.

Team Sunday getting ready to leave

Lovely blue skies for the walk out

After the clear up, just like we’d never been there

The rest of the troops spent a couple of hours tidying up and cleaning the place before riding back to Prendwick to dump their overnight kit before heading off for a few hours on the bikes around the Alwinton area.

Riding out from the cottage

Yes, definitely Northumberland at its best!

Watch out for the sequel “The Products” coming shortly!!!