Scenes from a run

Down to the Mersey and back

With no excursion this weekend, I’m taking a break from essay writing and instead offer these pictures from today’s run. The route is one I’ve come to call the “Fine Nine,” because it’s nine miles long and features most of my favorite sites in my area.

Queens Drive is one of the major roads the ring Liverpool out in the suburbs. Most the sidewalks and houses in my neighborhood look a lot like this. If only want to go a few miles, this is what I’ll be running through.

This is a shortcut to Sefton Park that I discovered last week. It’s always fun to spot one of these and say, “Hey, where does that go?” It’s often a nifty shortcut.

This is actually *not* the most impressive home on the block.

I stopped taking pictures for a stretch between the previous one and this one, because it had started raining. At this point, the rain had given way to hail, the Mersey was basically a wind tunnel for cold air from the Irish Sea, and already the sunlight was starting to return.

Here’s another footpath I discovered in the last couple of weeks. I spotted this one from the shuttle bus between campuses and said, “Hey, where does that go?” Turns out it’s a straight shortcut from the Mersey to Sefton Park (read: runner’s paradise).

A pretty typical intersection. When I knew I’d be living in Liverpool, I thought this was mostly what I’d be running in. Very glad to have been so wrong!

Liverpool’s artsy. This fairly grubby tunnel (under the intersection in the previous picture) nevertheless features paintings of local scenes by local artists.

Sefton Park is 235 acres of broad pathways, water features, bridges, forests, and open meadows. It’s about two miles from my flat, so if I’m running a little short on distance, I do some loops here until I’m exactly two miles shy of my goal. Best buffer ever.