For Annette’s birthday this August we went camping. We’ve never done it before, but it turned out to be great fun. Grace came over from Italy and spent the weekend with us – we wanted to go to Lulworth Cove and stay around Wareham in Dorset but by the time we went to book a B&B they were all full. Camping was actually the only way we could go, so we bought our own tent, sleeping bags, gas stove etc, and after a couple of practice runs in our own garden with the hens helping, off we went.
Our trip was very successful and not at all stressful. We stayed at a campsite which was specially for tents (no caravans) and that had received good reviews on the websites we had checked. We had read on their website that the owners were friendly and helpful, so it sounded ideal for our first visit.
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The holiday was great, but the Woodlands Camping Park campsite wasn’t – the owners, knowing that we were newbies, gave us a pitch that was basically a concrete base with 3″ of moss growing on top of it. We had done some test runs with the tent in the garden, with limited space and hens getting in the way, so were confident about putting it up for real – but when it came to it, with three of us it took much longer than it took Daniel on his own at home! All except 5 of the tent pegs refused to go in without bending.
So we went into the local town and bought some solid steel pegs and a rubber mallet, but they still bent!
We found the owner and persuaded him to come to help us, thinking that we were doing something wrong. He said that our tent pegs were of poor quality, and asked which hammer we were using. Eventually he reluctantly offered to get “a tool”. Back he came with what looked like a giant crowbar at one end and a sharp point at the other. He used that to bore a hole for us to then finish off hammering in our tent peg, and stopped, having broken out into a sweat. Annette had to direct him to keep repeating it, until 6 holes were made for the pegs, and another for the windbreaker, of which one pole had been broken by the concrete base of the pitch. The other tentpegs were left to do their best – half in and half out, but all bent.
He KNEW the nature of that pitch, yet pretended to be surprised, and look puzzled at his own ground. Annette still resents him for trying to make out that it was our fault and shortcoming rather than his shameful deceit – ok then, we’ll settle for shameful pretence.
Later that evening, just after 9 o’ clock, his wife went round the camp site offering sweets to the campers as well as to children in the tents. We were rather astonished at this, but accepted it to be their “thing” of children and clean teeth, and were ready to politely decline her offer of sweets. We needn’t have worried – she didn’t come round to us, and so we didn’t get offered any. (Fair to say that we were not missed out on the second night, but we declined. Grace accepted them though.)
We shopped at Lidl on the way down, and had everything we needed to make a proper cooked breakfast, and we think that we can say that even for our first camping trip, it was better than most of the seasoned campers managed:
As Annette loves seafood, we had planned to get some fresh fish during the trip, but we hadn’t planned it well enough, and the seafood places were either shut or not on our way when we were ready. So there is that treat to come for the next time we are in the West Country, which won’t be at the Woodlands Camping Park.