Well, we have had such a week in our tent in Wales... Ned and I are pretty seasoned campers by now - we've been camping as a couple since the early 90s, and with the boys since they were 9 months old. As you can seen from our lovely camping set up - we take it all pretty seriously! We're particularly proud of our tarpaulin... but maybe that's something that only fellow campers will appreciate...
In all our years of camping though, we've never experienced weather as bad as we had last week. We coped ok in the rain - in fact we rather like sitting in a cosy tent, with hot cups of tea, just spending time with the boys. And we had some lovely sunny spells too, when we spent time exploring the hills and rivers nearby, and taking a ride on the local narrow gauge steam railway. It was all going pretty well, in spite of the very damp conditions.
However, on Thursday night at about 11pm, the wind started to get up very strongly. We rushed outside and cleared away what we could and then went off to bed, hoping that all would be ok. I don't know about Ned, but I spent the next 2 hours praying that the tent would not collapse on top of us! It's hard to describe how scary it is to be inside a tent that is being violently wrenched about in the wind...
Sadly, at about 1am, a guy rope was ripped away from the tent causing one of the main tent poles to collapse. All of this was totally fixable, but not in pitch darkness in a howling gale, with rather upset children to sort out. We dived out of the tent and spent the rest of the night squeezed into our car, trying to get a bit of sleep.
The next day saw us waking early to more torrential rain and a lot of very wet stuff... For the first time ever we decided to give up on a holiday and come home... So here we are, back early, but glad to be safe and sound. We had lovely fish and chips last night and I've made scrumptious Victoria sponge today to cheer us up.
Some good things on our return:
An Etsy order from from someone who had actually been waiting for me to turn off my Vacation Mode setting - what a compliment!
The crochet project that I took with me to work on during the holiday survived all the trauma, and is looking pretty good so far.
Our garden is looking very pretty after some much needed rain.. tomatoes are growing to epic proportions and I harvested 4 courgettes for our pizza tonight.
So it's not too bad to be home (and we are planning to go camping again in September...).
