January is the month for Resolutions and Good Intentions. Of New Leaves and ditching old vices.

Half-way through January is the time for ditching those Good Intentions. Of slipping back to the ease of old habits. I read somewhere that it takes about three weeks to form a new habit, so if you’re still going strong at this point, soon you won’t have to try so hard to remember. It’ll have become the new habit.

In theory, anyway.

A couple of our Good Intentions are to a) use our National Trust membership more often, and b) go on Emergency-Pro-thingy-requiring walks. The first is trickier than the second, because our part of Wales is a little lacking in easily reached National Trust properties. There are still a handful, though, and the Gower coastline is managed by the National Trust, so there’s that, too. For those further afield, we might just have to have a few long days.

It took us a couple of weeks to go on our first, mainly because we were waiting for a hiking baby carrier to arrive for Tiny.

And we started by combining both goals with a trip to Dinefwr Castle. Admittedly, this walk, a whole 1.5 miles, is not really one which requires Emergency Pro-thingies. And we made use of the cafe at the house for something warming at the end anyway. It was sunny, but oh so cold!

But it was our first walk. Start small. Ease into it. Besides, though it wasn’t very long, it was the perfect balance of easy enough to be a comfortable walk, but challenging enough to feel like you earn an Emergency.

Although the Emergency Pro-thingies were not my greatest bakes. We had a banana blueberry bake from a Tesco recipe designed to use up milk (if you ask me, which you didn’t, you’d be better off making rice pudding to use up the milk), and which could have done with longer in the oven (we turned the remains into a custard pudding which was much better), and some sausage rolls which were…let’s say…Definitely Done. Fortunately, with puff pastry, you can knock off the top layers to find the less crispy ones beneath.

We didn’t have any emergencies on the walk. And M says the carrier was really comfortable, which is just as well because he was loaded up like a pack-horse, with Tiny and all the provisions.

Perhaps next time we’ll have better Pro-thingies. Or I won’t accidentally knock the temperature up on the oven when I’m baking the sausage rolls.

Newton House, which is the National Trust property connected to Dinefwr Castle, has several walks around it, not just the circular to the castle, and a deer park. We will likely return as the year progresses, to complete the other walks as well.