First of all many thanks everyone for adhering to the vow of silence I swore you all to before we left 😆
We’ve been away having hired a youth hostel for four nights in Yorkshire to have a Halloween camp. We stopped over night at Babs’ on the way up to celebrate Ben’s fifth birthday, I got to see Kirsty’s new house and Babs regaled us all with an impromptu piano performance (and no, it’s not stopped being funny yet! 😉 ) .
Monday we left fairly early to get to the youth hostel, look round the nearby area and get the food shopping in for the week. Ady and I had the same brainwave simultaneously when spotting a Tesco delivery van that we should have just done an internet shop a couple of weeks ago and scheduled it to arrive an hour after we were due to, but next time eh?
The youth hostel is / was lovely. Quite the nicest I’ve ever been in, but as that one took my quota to the grand total of three I guess I am not the very most reliable source of youth hostel reveiwers ever ;-). A really nice big living area, a good sized kitchen (with dishwasher 🙂 ) and really nice rooms all with sinks and individual bedside lights. Helmsley is lovely too, I do like Yorkshire and despite being rather more of a touristy town than a slice of real Yorkshire living it was very nice with the shops just a few minutes walk away. We had a large garden area complete with several apple trees which we made full use of, sending several children out apple collecting with carrier bags which we turned into a crumble and used for apple bobbing too.
I won’t bother doing a daily account but Ady, the children and I had a fab week. It was lovely to spend time with some of our favourite adults and children. It felt like a relaxing, happy, comfortable week with loads of communal living, lots of people doing what they did best and adding it to the group mix, a constant supply of children to play with and adults to chat to with added peace and quiet to sit and read or wander round the town as and when we felt the need. We had lovely late nights sitting up with friends, we filled the recycling box twice over, there was Jenga tournaments to end all Jenga tournaments, there was conga-ing, Anthony read us our rights and the bathroom facilities were suberb ;-).
We had a Halloween party on the last day, which was pretty much as child led as it gets. We’d brought along the bin liner full of stuff which had been dismantled from our Halloween party last year and just bunged in the garage. The children fell upon it and with very little help decorated the hostel beautifully. They collected apples for apple bobbing, Tilda helped with cooking and food preparation, Poppy, Anna and Tilda made potions and concoctions of party drinks and named them, Poppy came up with various party games using the bits and pieces from last year as props. It was pretty damn near perfect I reckon.
Did I mention we had mulled wine? 🙂
I won’t be mentioning the playdoh or the couscous naturally! 😉
Loads of pictures on flickr which I’m sure sum it up and I’ll look forward to reading others’ accounts of the week too. But thanks to all who came along and made it a fab week. 🙂
On the way home we had another overnight stop, this time with The Beans, which is always a winner with all of us. We barely saw any of the children, to the point of all getting a lovely lie in this morning while we listened to the children all playing really happily together. I do love Chris and Helen’s, it’s relaxed, there is wine and tea, the children love it there and we even got to bring fish into their house from The Chippery. 🙂
We got home around 6pm this evening – already dark and dark even earlier tomorrow of course. Davies fell asleep as his head hit the pillow, Tarly, who had had a restorative nap on the way home in the car was rather later to sleep but we have a quiet day at home planned for tomorrow before launching straight back into real life again on Monday. 🙂
Sounds fantastic 😉 Next year?
Comment by layla — 29 October 2006 @ 1:53 pm
The pictures are great! Looks like you all had a really brilliant time!
Comment by Lucy — 29 October 2006 @ 2:31 pm
Haven’t read for ages but thought I’d pop along and say hello! Sounds like you had a fab time in Helmsley and the photos look great.
Comment by Kath — 30 October 2006 @ 12:27 am
We really missed you Kath – it was great to see A&M, but would have bene even better with all 4 of you 🙂
Comment by Alison — 30 October 2006 @ 4:39 pm