On a damp, dreary and unseasonably cold Sunday morning, GoodGym returned to what has now become a regular slot at Sydney Gardens. This was always a beautiful park, but the work that has been done to it in recent years has added to it's glory, and I'd like to think GoodGym have had a part to play in that.

In attendance in this glorious paradise (weather notwithstanding), we Cosmo, Richard and Meyrick plus the addition of Cos's sister for today who has a connection to the park in that she knows one of the landscape designers of the gardens.

Last time we were here it was sand, this time it was wood chip. Lighter to transport, thankfully, but there is always a fair distance to transport the goods from depot to required location. Once again we were delivering to the new adventure playground, helping to tidy up the flower beds in the bottom end of the park.

It will come as no surprise that we shoveled and wheelbarrowed our way through the majority of the pile we were introduced to at the beginning of the mission, by our ever friendly hosts.

And would you believe the Sun started to emerge as we finished off, it might not feel like Spring yet but we had a spring in our steps.

They have a really great new play area at Sydney Gardens. One of the features is a sandpit, through which runs a water feature from top to bottom. Problem is with sand is it disappears with time.

Some of this could be explained by he usual processes of fluvial erosion but in this case enthusiastic children likely contribute in the course of doing exactly what they should be doing, play.

The task for the 5 GoodGymmers that attended was to replenish the sand in order that play could continue. Naturally the location of the backup sand was the furthest distance away from where it was needed. I'm beginning to see a common rule here, the need for a 'heavy to transport' material is inversely proportional to its distance from the location it is needed.

Undeterred, GoodGymmers Stephen, Mark, Kate, Jane and Meyrick set about the task. We had three wheelbarrows though, so our output was limited. Plus one of those wheelbarrows suffered a puncture at the start to we improvised.

We mus have made a dozen trips though, gratefully received by the on site volunteers who were raking the sand over to return the sandpit to its former glory.

No doubt this will be required again as play resumes, but all in all a Sandtastic effort from all involved.

Our mission: To fill up the sandpit with sand.

The only problem.... the sand was about 400 metres away down a hill :)

So off we went with 4 wheelbarrows and a couple of shovels and loaded each wheelbarrow to push back up across the park to the giant sandpit. 1 hour and numerous trips later and we had filled a giant hole.

Although, not complete, we made a huge dent in the sand bags and saved a lot of heavy lifting for the regular volunteers

Starting in the warm autumnal sunshine I did think i was being rather ambitious wearing sunglasses as the forecast was 50/50 for showers.

We jog together on the river path to the canal and then up the hills to get the beautiful views over the city. From here we descended down into the city back along the canal to Sydney gardens.

Within seconds of meeting the task owner, the rain belted down and was relentless. Within minutes we were soaked. The team split into three groups, weeding, pruning and pulling ivy off a wall. Within 20 minutes, we all joined the ivy team as it was the most undercover and within a short space of time we had cleared the wall. We decided to finish up early as we were drenched and jogged back into Bath for a well earned hot drink!

The sun is now out and is dry. Typical autumnal weather!!

We gathered by the tennis courts for a rematch with the infamous wrongly-laid Sydney Gardens path.

This epic battle started with a strong opening set back in May and some strong opening service sending the old path down the lines into storage ready for the next play.

A stunning comeback in the second set delivered the path back to its rightful location to level the score.

For this third set we had three enormous bags of hogging which needed transporting (the deliverers had clearly heard we know our way around a wheelbarrow at GoodGym Bath and had handily delivered them to the far side of the park for us) to top off the path so that hopefully it’ll finally be Game, Set and Path to us!

Today’s play featured some mixed doubles with Dan and Ellie covering the side-lines and tidying up some of the borders, while the rest of the team took up the wheelbarrows between us to serve up some ace delivery of the majority of the topping onto the path.

The night was drawing in though, and these tennis courts aren’t covered so eventually we had to stop play with the match still in the balance.

Tune in for the next instalment (or come along and join in!) to see how this delicately poised matchup turns out…

It’s not something we often do at GoodGym, but this evening we took the wrong path.

I mean, we literally took the path, dug it up, shovelled it into buckets and wheelbarrowed it off to a storage facility.

They’ve been doing a lot of work in Sydney Gardens in the past couple of years. Installing a wopping new playground, loads of other grounds work, Network Rail are still working on some walls alongside the railway, and a little path has been installed by the little temple structure at the top end of the park next to the tennis courts.

Only the path was put in the wrong place, and doesn’t go anywhere!

So Friends of Sydney Gardens have asked us to dig it up for them - they felt it was a stretch too far for their “regular” park volunteers…

The path itself was easy enough to dig up, but needed to be taken the full length of the park, bucketload by bucketload, all the way down to the storage yard round the back of the Holborne Museum.

Between us we managed to get about half of the path moved… but have left a bit for the rest of you lucky people to have another go at in a couple of weeks time!

Enjoy!!