It's October - It's the Ultimate Blog Challenge 2023

Sweet Chestnut dazzles in Orange. Photo by Janice Gill

We're into the last quarter of 2023 and the last of the Ultimate Blog Challenges (UBC) of the year.

The UBC is all about writing and posting every day for the calendar month, making connections and building relationships. Setting a goal and joining a group of bloggers with the same aim improves the likelihood of reaching the target.

As the year moves on, we can look forward to the holiday season and, if you live in northern latitudes as I do, snuggling up cosily as the days shorten and cool.

As I've reached my seventh decade, I've noticed that I hibernate more and more at this time of year, losing some fitness and struggling to regain it in the spring. So, I'm giving myself a second challenge - to get out and walk each day with my camera.

This challenge has multiple benefits - it gets me exercising, works up an appetite, and gets me taking plenty of photographs for starters. I'll also be observing my surroundings from landscape vistas to tiny macro subjects - great for exercising your brain.

Each day of this challenge, I'll post some photos from my wanderings, and let you know where I visited and how hard the trek was. I'd like to invite you all to join me in this challenge at whatever level you see fit. Even 15 minutes of walking where you would have been sitting will help keep you fitter.

Today, I walked for half an hour in a local park. The trees are changing colour and beginning to fall, and the horse-chestnut trees are dropping their beautifully coloured conkers. When I was young children would have been racing to collect them to play "Conkers" and battle to see whose was the toughest. These days, the conkers lie where they fall.

Tomorrow, depending on the weather, I'll aim to get out in nature for an hour. Will you join my challenge?