Last of the Summer
So why not spend early Sept in a 15 foot caravan on the road round Cornwall? we asked ourselves. The clincher was being able to send Sam outside to sleep in the awning.
The UK's brilliant for cheap caravan sites, many in farmer's fields. Our first was a flasher-than-average one near the dumpy town of Bridgewater, for one night, with its own pond and dodgy dinghy, putting green and waterwheel.
Cornwall proper, and whaddya mean the water's cold? Kids only got in the once, here, at the caves-and-dunes beach beauty spot of Holywell Bay - British summer water temps of 16 degrees ("don't be a wooss, that's as good as it gets," a local told Phil) put paid to our hopes of surf school lessons.
THE best view from a supermarket carpark we've ever seen, in Newquay.
Sam descends a ladder by the river at Looe for a bucket of seawater during the kids' No.1 fave activity, crabbing: Didn't matter a jot that after all that pulling them up, you just chucked them back in at the end. The payback was reading time on the quay with the 1st-ever decent fish and chips we've had.
We took the boat across to St Michael's Mount, where the family who own it still live after 300 years, then walked the Causeway back to shore when the tide hadn't quite gone all the way out...
The Causeway.
Land's End, a little peculiar with its deserted theme park attractions, shut up pub and a hotel where they weren't serving any grub
- but we found decent greasies again, this time at the Last Pub .
Minack Theatre among the cliffs near Penzance - the Truro amateur dramatists put on Gilbert & Sullivan, a true knockout for our guys on the way home at 11pm.
Crabbing again, at Padstow.
A 2-minute stop to see the aeon-carved wonders of the Bedruthan Steps. Phil: "Who wants to climb down to the beach with me?" Jac: "Who wants the car to still be here when they get back up?"
North from Cornwall and a few days in Wiltshire/Dorset in a true farmer's field caravan park (9 quid a night - but we had to use the cupboard-sized shower for the first time, and everyone was under strict orders to go to the loo while we were out, and hold on otherwise). Shaftesbury's claim to fame is Gold Hill, the UK's advertising equivalent of the NZ Mainland cheese ad village.
Picnicking at Wardour castle.
"Hello, Stonehenge here." We'd been told to be prepared to be underwhelmed - "it's small," people said - but felt quite the opposite, despite the crowds.
Through the mist with the caravan's water bottle.
Farm days, tree climbing and tractor rides at the outstanding museum-in-a-13th-century-barn at the massive stone circle at Aylesbury.
Our final meal, and Lara's first lost tooth, at what locals say is the only pub inside a stone circle in the world.Goodbye to the Aylesbury stones, and to the UK summer.
