We’ve done lots of walking these last two days. Walking seems to be the new driving and in the same way we often had our most interesting questions from the kids and general conversations while driving we are doing plenty of talking too.
The walking is a mix of death defying walks along roads with no pavements – single file all the way with Ady and the front and me at the back on the basis cars will swing right out to get round me 😉 and a gorgeous path which runs with a railtrack on one side and a canal on the other. Yesterday we did start Willow up (I get nervous about leaving her sitting unstarted for more than a couple of days) and drove a couple of miles to a nearby Co Op to stock up on food for a couple of days. Getting our heads round the fact we have a fridge and an oven, hob and grill for storing and cooking food and so can graduate from our usual camping fayre while still being limited by the smaller space, less utensils and more cramped prep area than at home in a kitchen is meaning we need to meal plan. Ady has been cooking so far so I offered to cook for us and made tortillas and tacos which is one of our favourite meals at home. We’d decided to buy burgers from the campsite (it’s a beef cattle farm) for dinner tonight and eggs (they also have a large flock of hens) for breakfast so got the rest of the bits we needed for those meals.
We came back to the campsite – Willow was running fine – and then headed off again on a walk. The campsite owner had told us a walkable route into Newton Abbot so we did that to post a couple of letters I’d been carrying around for days and failed to post, and checked out the Tescos for reduced to clear bargains so walked back to the campsite eating cheap fruit and Scarlett had a large portion of sushi as a starter for her dinner. We got back and I decided to tackle the pile of dirty washing so took the kindle and a supply of change and went and sat in the laundry room while Ady sorted the kids tea. It took way longer than expected as they were just domestic machines and I had two loads which then took bloody ages to dry. I did hang towels over the radiators in the toilets and we left Ady’s sweatshirt on one overnight. Felt quite cross with how much money I spent compared to the industrial dryer at the previous campsite which had everything dry in one go.
Davies rang to say he was missing me so then I popped back to Willow inbetween feeding the tumble drier. We watched Flushed Away on the laptop and the kids went to bed when the washing was finally dry, then I finished Ady and my dinner. We had quite a late night (by campervan standards 😉 )- and set the bed up about midnight.
Today was a slower start, listening to the radio and all cuddled up together on our bed before packing everything up and setting the table and chairs up. We waited ages for the little office on site to open so we could buy eggs and burgers, finally ringing and getting the farmer to come to us, which he did, hanging out at Willow for about half an hour hearing all about our WWOOFing adventure. He veered between being very ‘seize the day’ and very ‘but not for me’ :).
I cooked a lovely brunch of sausage, bacon, eggs and toast which filled us all up enough to keep us going on another long walk. We’d found some wild garlic yesterday and today we found all sorts of fungi but were not able to id any of it. We came up with a list of things we *really* must bring with us on walks including our Food for Free book. We saw a poster showing various wild life living along the path which included otters and herons. Scarlett and I looked out for otter signs, I’ve just finished reading Phillipa Forrester’s book ‘The River’ which talks lots about otter spotting so was able to tell Scarlett about spraints and other signs (thanks Kirsty, enjoyed that read 🙂 ) but didn’t see any. We did spot a heron though which almost made up for the lack of otters.
We had a sit down and chat midway along the walk at a pretty point with a handy stone for sitting on and just talked about what wobbles we were having and how we were all feeling. I’m so proud of Davies and Scarlett and how they are dealing with everything, helping each other through tricky moments, being articulate about what they are struggling with, enjoying, dreading, excited about. We got to talking about retrospective perspective and how I kept comprehensive diaries as a teenager and now look back at them and see how I did get over that love I swore I never would recover from, those worries that kept me awake and night and had me crying into my pillow never came to anything. Everyone is really benefitting from having three other people living the same experiences on hand to talk stuff through with and the kids are both citing having Ady around all the time as a great thing.
Back at the campsite we had tea and biscuits and sat chatting and catching up with screens before dinner. Dinner is later than planned thanks to the gas bottle running out mid-cooking but we’re about to set up a film and all eat together tonight.
wondering what you did to Ady to ‘finish’ him?
Comment by Daddybean — 04 March 2011 @ 11:33 pm
My browser keeps crashing when I try to leave a message on your wanderers blog. I think it’s some blogger thing. Wanted to say how much Leo would love to see an otter print. He put flour out in our garden and got a fox print last night but there’s nowhere near here I think we’ll see an otter one.
Comment by Allie — 06 March 2011 @ 3:32 pm