They seemed a little embarrassed at first, but as my wife asked questions they warmed to the topic. They had looked rather out of place walking along the path.

We came across this grey-haired couple on one of our afternoon walks. From a distance we weren’t completely sure what was going on. They couldn’t be playing with children’s toys, could they?

They were. Husband and wife each had a radio-controlled car with them on the walk. My wife, whose German is much better than mine, asked for the story.

The husband had only had his car for a week. He got it when he saw how much fund his wife was having with hers, that she had gotten a couple of weeks before. Apparently their adult son had started the trend.

The son, she said, was somewhat overweight. Having the car encouraged him to get out to walk. In the first month or so he lost 12 kilos (about 25 pounds) as he was spending three hours a day outdoors walking and playing with his new toy.

These days there’s not much you can do to entertain yourself. Everything is shut down during the pandemic. I gather this couple find walking boring.

I get that. When I walk alone I usually listen to music, occasionally to a podcast. As beautiful as this area is, after a while you take it for granted. And in the winter there isn’t much sunshine to brighten things up. (I checked – in the past two weeks we averaged an hour a day, and most days there was none.) If racing toy cars gets this couple out and exercising, then that would seem to be a good thing.

It still seems funny though, to see people in their sixties, or perhaps their seventies, playing with children’s toys.

If it were me, I’d probably have gotten a drone, with a camera, so I could explore from on high and see things I don’t ordinarily get to see. But I would probably have nowhere near as much fun as this couple.

It was nice to see.