After a week of recovering from jet lag, catching up with old friends, and generally enjoying the feeling of ‘coming home’, we left Hertfordshire and London bound for adventures unknown in Wales and Scotland.
We found a beautiful campsite on the Herefordshire/Wales border, near Abergavanny. What we love most about this part of the country – besides its incredible pastoral beauty – is that it is simply chock-a-block with castles. They were thrown up wily-nily over the centuries as the Normans and the Welsh took umbrage with one another. One gory example of this was when the Norman Lord at Abergavanny -- in an unprecedented mood of expansive hospitality -- invited all his Welsh neighbours up to the castle for Christmas dinner. Once they were all gathered and dining, however, his Christian goodwill faltered and he massacred the lot. Not to be outdone, the Welsh waited seven years and then descended upon the castle and murdered all the inhabitants. Sadly (?!), the Lord was not at home that day, so despite the bloodbath Abergavanny castle remained a Norman stronghold.
The kids simply lap up all the blood and gore… Cachell has taken to dropping ‘how –to ‘ questions about beheadings into casual conversations, which is a bit unnerving!!!
Our castle roaming culminated in preparing and eating supper in a completely deserted ruin at Gosforth. I manned the ‘Buttery’ whilst the children donned their armour and weapons (bought at various castles from London to Caerphilly) and patrolled the chunks of walls that were still intact. “Really”, as I asked Mitch when we were preparing to leave and the first drops of rain were beginning to fall, “could it get much better? Dinner in a castle and then home to warm dry beds?” It had been raining off and on all day, but somehow never seemed to interfere with our enjoyment – and we’d been exceptionally lucky in having a break in the weather when we need to climb a hill or scale a battlement.
Our luck turned a bit as we drove into our campsite – essentially just a corner of a beautiful field on a dairy farm. Mitch and the children stayed at the wash centre in the parking lot as I navigated through the rapidly growing dark and drizzle up towards our tent. Except for a caravan housing a lovely couple from Bristol, we had been fortunate to have the entire place to ourselves; even the owners had gone off for a few days. So I was surprised to see a new white tent glimmering in the dark as I made my way up the hill… and I wondered why they had pitched it so close to us. Then I found myself starting to run on the slippery, rain-soaked ground as I realised that I was not looking at a new tent, but our own – minus its waterproof fly!!!
The horror-struck possibilities that had been reeling through my mind paled in comparison to the reality that I saw as I peered through the screen door – completely unprotected from the weather, our tidily laid out sleeping bags were covered with puddles of water. I wrenched open the door and put my hands on the suitcases… they, too, were completely waterlogged; their contents ranged from damp to sodden. The floor of the tent was covered in a good inch of water.
At this point Sandra, our neighbour in the caravan, came puffing up the hill, almost in tears of apology, saying “we couldn’t do anything, it was locked!”. Between Sandra’s story and the state of the things, we hypothisized that a group of children – probably more curious than malicious – tried to get into the tent, which they found locked, but in the process undid all the lines holding the waterproof fly down, so that with the first stormy gust, it simply lifted right off.
As Mitch and I looked at each other, thinking that this was going to mean an emergency trip to a B & B or hotel – at a massive blow to our budget, if we could find one open at that time of night, Sandra was bustling about, saying “right, I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon -- you can stay in the corridor outside the loos. They’re clean enough, and I have blankets and some cushions.”
So we spent the night on the floor of a bathroom, under borrowed blankets and even an old curtain from our friends in the caravan, as our sleeping bags dripped steadily from overtop of the shower stall walls. We were up – literally – with the cock crow in the morning, and packed up the wet tent and the soggy gear before the drizzle became a downpour…
I was seriously tempted to succumb to laziness and hightail it back to London where one of our friends would have taken pity on us in our sodden state… but Natalie was so worried already as we left London that I felt that we needed to survive this little bump in the road on our own. Of course, as we packed up the tent a pole broke so we had to detour to get it restrung… but what we discovered during this mini-challenge (as well as during the night before) is just how genuinely kind people are when someone is in serious distress. Sandy and Doug literally gave us the blankets off their beds to get us through the night, and then the fellow at the gear shop in Brecon restrung our pole, gave us extra string in case it happened again, and phoned on to confirm that the next place we were headed to actually had a dryer (!!) – all without charging us a penny. And we arrived here in the Lake District to neighbours who plied us with cups of tea and pudding as we rushed about 'drying out'. So although out stuff was dampened (and then some), our spirits remained sunny,
Of course, today Caelan locked the keys in the car, only to have the RAC discovered that this model is virtually impossible to break into… and the relative humidity remains at 87%, so 'dry' truly is a relative term... but we just keep reminding ourselves that this is all about one minute at a time. The biggest challenge is remembering that it is all an adventure; and that the most difficult ones leave us with the best stories to tell.
Having said that, I am off to bed, grateful for a (hopefully) dry sleeping bag, and a well-pegged fly.
Nos da (or 'goodnight' as the Welsh say it.)
