wonderful fossil filled holiday – part 1

we have been away! we spent a weekend at a forest campsite with the porticos before moving on to charmouth to fossil!

we really needed a relaxing and regrouping time, and were lucky enough to get that. time to breathe really! the forest park bit was mostly spent cycling around the road, drinking tea and chatting. bb in particularly loves the opportunity to just cycle wildly around, and campsite roads are perfect. she often persuaded gwenny to cycle with her – who luckilly realised bb must always ‘win’, and i did some circuits on my lovely bike too. SB did a fair bit of games playing with ernest, and bb, buttercup and sb did convoluted games with schleich elves and such like. we did try a cycle ride in the forest which started well, until bb had a small strop about continuing, so we waited for chris to sort out trailgator and the others played swingin and jumping over trees and branches quite happily. a toilet need and a puncture meant we had to retire without really getting anywhere, but low key and relaxed anyway!!

next day we went to see some ‘wet stones’ at avebury – but actually didn’t rain much so were nice and dry. the children mostly ran about and rambled and pretended to listen to a short description of what they were seeing and the highlight for them was running up and down the huge ditch. gwenny and i talked about brains and pickling them- giggle, so i did at least educate one child! BB got her first bit of retail therapy in – nannabean had given them 10 each, and it was burning a hole in her pocket. she got some stones to share [which she did, bless] and some shark teeth which she loved.

picnic by the cars and then a debate about where to go next, which saw us off to caen locks as recommended by porticos. the high point for the girls was being allowed t open and shut 2 of the locks by one of the canal boats going through. oh, and the ice cream. bit rainy that night, but fine enough to take tent down in the morning, wave the porticos good bye and set off to charmouth.

we did, unfortunately, have a crisis on the drive down, chris had left bb’s shark teeth on the roof, and on driving off from the service station the inevitable happened… BB was disconsolate, in a very noisy and angry way for the next 2 hours…