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Several visits back to Lincolnshire ago, on an occasion when there was a bike available and I biked through to Horncastle, I went along Hemingby Lane to see what was at the time the unexpected sight of a random zebra in one of the fields belonging to the Riddell skip empire. It might have been too far back to Blip and perhaps even beyond me owning a functioning digital camera, but it was definitely there .Today, on the other side of the road, there's now a small but quite presentable wildlife park, with a few big cats, a couple of bears and camels and then a few things perhaps more suited to being in a relatively small field, like goats, llamas and tiny horses. In the morning on my first way past I went the same way, for a last wee look at Hemingby (which is just quite nice to look at, though I do recall the wee pub there as being interestingly low-ceilinged and too small to house a pool table when we went there when we were on the pub quiz team) then a trundle across the Louth road for the second-best descent into Belchford, past the village hall where we had lunch when we built a badger sett, then up what would be the best descent (though the surface perhaps demotes it) to Fulletby, for a last look at Hoe Hill, which isn't particularly hilly but which has always had a nice wee tuft on the top and which was right beside the path we took up from Tetford on the DofE bronze expedition. I only discovered these wee roads properly after 1990ish, when I chose the Bike Ride option for a school activity afternoon and found that I was quite able to keep up with people on far fancier and lighter bikes with many more gears. They way down from Fulletby Top to Low Toynton is only a mild descent, though offers unrivalled views of the flat southern half of the county, but the wind was counteracting the very mild acceleration due to gravity today. On the way back through Horncastle I trundled around the main bits a few times (having been past a couple, like my school, on the way in), then took the road back to Woodhall. It always seemed a bit of a slog in either direction when I was small, particularly with the occasional whooshing idiot on hedge-obscured blind corners, but it's a lot less busier than even a small city and at 6½ miles across four main sections it's not as big as it once seemed.
Later, in the car, we returned to visit the wildlife park, where Amos spent most of the time retrieving stray goat-pellets to feed to the goats and Edgar listened to the tiny horses and the donkey. On the way back we popped to what is now the big Tesco, which is really only a medium Tesco, which used to be the big Co-op, reached by a bridge which I would occasionally dangle halfway across before climbing up over the parapet when we used to meet there before heading to the pub, and where we once saw the whole sky momentarily lit up green by a meteor.