Wednesday 1 July 2026 - Spunch Urmston

Whilst followers of England's World Cup football match were enduring a stressful but ultimately successful evening, Sue and I set off on a two hour Spunch event in Urmston.

Sue took the above picture in Davyhulme Park before we split up as I had to revert to walking pace due to a painful occurence of Ischia bursitis (aka A Pain in the Bum).

HQ for this event was the Bevano (after Aneurin Bevan) Lounge on Flixton Road near Urmston railway station. Aneurin Bevan opened nearby Park Hospital, now Trafford General, on 5 July 1948 - the first NHS hospital.

During the evening I'd bumped into parkrunner Frank Cordingley - "Just out for a run - never heard of Spunch". Well, he has now.

Back at HQ after two hours of exercise, beer and a meal, whilst we waited for Alistair Pooler, who we knew was out there somewhere. He and his mate Dan did very well, as did another parkrunner who lives close to us in Timperley, Paul Steane, who joined us after the finish.

Here are the 120 minute event results - click on the image for a clearer version:

The route I took - about 12km - is shown below in blue. I went wrong at the bottom left and at the end, but it was a reasonable effort considering I walked the last few km.

Sunday 28 June 2026 - Remain-i-Ere

Here's the view from tonight's room at the Ramada Hotel, Bucharest.

Here's last night's excellent room at Schuster Boarding House in Brasov. A 'Boutique' hotel.

And here's the Boarding House after we left at around 11am this morning.

We were efficiently driven to the airport by 2pm, in plenty of time for our 6pm flight to Amsterdam. 

A thank you message was sent to Maria and the staff at Collett's who have looked after us on this trip, and their job was done. Thank you.

After lunch at the airport our phones started to buzz with messages from KLM, who claimed our flight from Amsterdam to Manchester had been cancelled. It may have been. We then got messages claiming our flight from Bucharest to Amsterdam had been cancelled. As we had boarding cards and were standing next to people checking in for the flight, this was patently untrue. Perhaps it is cheaper to put us up in Bucharest than in Amsterdam. Anyway, cutting a longer but fairly boring story short, a taxi eventually brought us here to an acceptable room with a view of the airport.

We are second class citizens relegated to the 'naughty corner' of the restaurant where we are not allowed to choose from the menu and are given soup and chicken kebabs and made to pay for our beer.

Hopefully we will get home tomorrow, but the chap coming from far away in the morning to service our alarm will be disappointed to find nobody at home.

PS We got home. 11:15 taxi > Bucharest airport > Amsterdam > Heathrow > Manchester > taxi > Timperley 23:45. Not without incident at Manchester Airport where the UK Arrivals door had been locked for the night, but the escalator ferrying passengers to those doors was still going strong, resulting in a 'health and safety' incident.