Day 237 - Sunday 24th August

"If one dream should fall and break into a thousand pieces, never be afraid to pick one of those pieces up and begin again.” —Flavia Weedn; author, artist

We went camping yesterday to the New Forest. It started off pretty catastrophic as the campsite we went to was fully booked and then when phoning around, we were told that all the campsites were full. The local tourism office luckily found us a site that could accommodate us. We pitched our tents and we had a great Saturday. The new tent was brilliant and the porch on it made all the difference as it meant you could store everything in there, rather than in the sleeping part of the tent. All the kids had a wonderful time and made lots of new friends and we had a lovely barbeque in the evening. It started to rain a little bit in the evening but it soon stopped. There seemed to be a big party going on in the building behind the campsite and it sounded like they had a live band playing so it was very noisy. I was really struggling to sleep with all the noise but did eventually drop off, only to be woken at 2am with some drunken yobs arguing. This went on and on for about an hour and then it started to rain – and I mean absolutely chuck it down. I did drop off again at about 4am and then Zoë woke up at 5.45am. Desperate for the toilet I made a trek across the campsite at 6am in the pouring rain. By 7am we had decided to pack up our tents and come home as the rain didn’t look like it was going to stop and we were all wet and miserable. We had left by 9am. As we hit Ringwood the sun came out and it has lasted all day.
Saying all that I had a brilliant time and cannot wait to do it again.