The campsites

As promised, here are the details of the campsites that we stayed at:

Braggs Lane Farm Campsite
Braggs lane
Herne, Herne Bay
Kent
CT6 7NP
01227 367261
£14 per night

Kingsdown International Camping centre

The Avenue
Kingsdown
Kent
CT14 8DU
01304 373713
£14 per night
 

Norwood Farm Caravan and Camping Park

Newchurch
Romney Marsh
Kent
TN29 0DU
01303 870465
07591 695035
£12 per night
 

Cobbs Hill Farm Caravan and Camping Park

Watermill Lane
Bexhill-on-Sea
East Sussex
TN39 5JA
01424 213460
£16 per night

Ecclesden Farm

Water Lane
Angmering
BN16 4ER
01903 784426
£12per night

We enjoyed all of them and would be happy to go back to any of them again. Kingsdown and Ecclesden are the more basic sites and you can pick where you pitch in the vast fields. The other 3 are all (I think) Camping and Caravan Club sites where we were shown to or given a choice of specific pitches. All had flush loos, showers and washing up facilities and friendly owners/staff!

The price per night was the total charge for two of us in a tent with no electric hook-up.

End of the trip

It's been another great summer trip around the Region. Very many thanks to all those of you who have expressed an interest in our travels and to the many of you who have met us along the way - it will go down as another 'summer to remember'!

I've had various thoughts about next year: walk the London Loop - taking us into the outer London Boroughs or maybe taking Southern Rail up on their book ahead £5 tickets and going out on day trips around the Region. Nick's suggestion is that we could eat a meal in every service station in the Region - well it would be a different challenge! Some of you have kindly made suggestions via Twitter: visit every castle, cathedral, National Trust property or set an A-Z of activities to do across all the Counties. What do you think? Please let me know!

Fascinating facts and figures:

• we've travelled 1,033 miles compared to 835.6 last year
• camped for 10 nights compared to 19 last year
• longest drive 160 miles (107.1miles)
• shortest 25 miles (14miles)
• eaten 9 ice creams each - counting Molly and Nick as one person! (7 last year)
• had 5 rainy days this year - 13 last year
• visited 32 beaches
• built 199 sandcastles - with help!
• 3 people visited us both last year and this year

Day 13 Selsey and the Witterings to home

We've had a wonderful trip but now find ourselves a day ahead on schedule and thinking of home. Nick whisked off to Greece with his sisters before the end of his dance term and then had barely a 24 hour turn around before coming away with me. I've been attempting to keep up with emails whilst away but have an overflowing inbox that needs dealing with, preferably before I head off to Berlin first thing on Friday. So, we decided to pack up, spend a full day exploring and head home up the A3 late evening, only an hour's drive away. 

The tent was almost dry, just a bit damp around the bottom from the long grass so we were happy that we wouldn't have a big job ahead of us when we got home. We've only got a small garden so no room to pitch a tent to dry, meaning wet kit gets draped over the sofas if we have a wet strike!

We took our time packing up in the warm sunshine aiming to get to Selsey around 12.00 to meet Liz, another guiding friend. We'd been warned about traffic queues but in fact had little problem on the roads, arriving spot on time. We had a lovely walk around the headland, stopping for crab salads for lunch in the Lifeboat pub - and lots of chatter about guiding, of course!

The two of us pressed onto Bracklesham Bay - an ice cream and photo on the beach and then onto East and West Wittering. By late afternoon, the tide was in and the skies looked threatening, topped off by high car parking charges we decided to not to explore the obviously very popular beaches - we'll leave them for another time.

Itchenor is a very pretty village and quayside. We enjoyed watching people crabbing for a while and then drove round to Bisham Hoe on the other side of the bay. On all our journeys we've talked about guiding and wondered where local units meet - I wonder if girls meet in these small village or have to travel much further afield? In London there would be no shortage of girls within say a 15 minute walk of a Brownie unit but it must be a very different matter in the rural areas of the Region.

Looking at the map I decided that our very last stop along the coastline of LaSER would be Thorney Island - there felt to be a completeness finishing with an island having started with one too at the Isle of Sheppey. Unfortunately, as we drove out towards the actual island part of the peninsula we came upon the RAF base and were told that we could drive no further. We were welcome to walk around the island but that will have to be another trip too, no time today.

Our very last stop was on the quayside in Emsworth (just over the border into Hampshire) where we enjoyed fish and chips in the evening sunshine watching the seabirds and fountain spouting cockles in the mud whilst looking over at Thorney Island in West Sussex!

Selsey with Liz

Emsworth (Hants!) looking over to Thorney Island, West Sussex

Day 12 Shoreham to Bognor Regis

We busied ourselves around the campsite til late morning following a very damp start, catching up with emails and yesterday's blog entry, before setting off back along towards the east to pick up on where we left off at lunchtime yesterday.

Lots of traffic problems along the way - again - so detoured around Worthing and ended up on the beach in Lancing where we spent a very pleasant hour or so eating lunch and watching lots of children enjoying the sea at high tide - the stuff that British summer holidays are made of, shame that Molly wasn't with us, she'd have loved it!

I feel that I've really 'engaged' with pebbly beaches and breakwaters/groynes on this trip. I'd hated them as a child and was pleased that holidays of my childhood were spent in North Devon with miles of rolling sands at Putsborough and Woolacombe and fabulous foaming surf to play in and what is now known as 'belly boarding' but was then referred to as 'surfing'. On this trip though I've grown to love the sound of the tide crashing on the pebbles and shingles and enjoyed the surprise as the tide has pulled out to reveal rock pools and sand, seaweed and shellfish. I've also appreciated the need for the groynes in protecting our precious coastline. All this and within only an hour or two's drive of SW London - we're so lucky!

Moving on, we parked at Goring and enjoyed a gentle stroll along the path beside the beach, indulged in an ice cream and jumped back in the car to move onto Ferring. We didn't get down to the beach at Ferring but instead happened upon Ferring Country Centre - New Horizons - offering employment and training opportunities to young adults with learning disabilities. It's obviously a great favourite with young children and their parents with its small farm and excellent cafe with homemade cakes.

Our last visit of the day was to Bognor Regis. Driving into the town we came face to face with Butlins, which certainly dominates your arrival into Bognor, Nick was very interested to see the complex although unsure of whether he'd like to stay there. He's heard a lot about Butlins at Bognor as LaSER prepares for Funtastic! our 3rd Brownie residential adventure there for over 4,000 Brownies. Our first foray into a large scale Brownie event at Butlins was Funtasia, followed by Funtenary in Girlguiding's Centenary year and next January we'll be celebrating the Big Brownie Birthday (100 years) with another of our much sought after events.

Bognor was chilly and quiet at the end of the day, so it was just a quick dash to the beach and then back to the campsite for BBQ'd sausages, chocolate bananas and a bottle of red. A thought struck me, but too late, mulled wine would be a very pleasant drink around the  bucket BBQ in the chill of the evening as we watched for the Perseids meteor shower! Fabulous sighting at 9.30pm ish, wish I'd been able to catch it on camera but it was far to fast for me!

Our little encampment!

... all the way to the top of the field, across the road and down to the farmyard for the loos!

Goring?

Can you work out where we are?

Toasting marshmallows at the end of the day!

Day 11 Bexhill to Angmering

So, the BBC Weather App can't always predict precipitation with a 100% accuracy or maybe it's a case of operator error in not reading the small print of probability weighed against wishful thinking! The campers amongst you will appreciate the desirability of a dry strike even when moving onto another campsite on the same day, the non-campers will think I'm bonkers - just chuck the tent in the back of the car and drive on!! We did. Rain overnight and a still morning with little sight of sunshine = very wet tent. By 9.30 it was drying off ok, I was even contemplating that really nerdy thing of turning the tent round to dry the other side when ..... the heaven's opened! Tent was chucked in the back of the car dripping wet.

Still talking about tents, if you followed 'a summer to remember' last year you may recall that I bought a new tent for the trip, a Gelert Nebula 4 which we named 'Bertha', sadly Bertha sustained irreparable damage to a couple of poles and despite extensive use of duct tape, finally gave up the fight after 8 days of use. Other than the dodgy poles and no replacement pole - why don't tent manufacturers see the virtue of including a spare?? -  the tent suited our needs well. 4 berths can usually be interpreted as 3 with comfort or 2 with luxury which meant that we had plenty of room, a bonus when we were pitching every day. The 3 pole tunnel with bathtub construction meant we could pitch in 10 minutes as long as we didn't stop to stare in awe and wonder at the world around us. The jury is still out on the merits of bathtub groundsheets though, I tend to favour the grass as my floor covering of choice in the living area of a tent, it means you can happily wander in with full wet weather gear on and not be worried about muddy wellies and dripping cags. I have a very different attitude if there's a groundsheet in place! Judicious placement of a car boot liner for stepping into and divesting oneself of footgear is fine, but then you also have to take into consideration the wobble factor which is really only aided by the use of a strategical placed chair ....... I ramble on but you get my gist!

The aforementioned Bertha was sent back to Amazon for a full refund as apparently the tent was no longer available and we continued our trip last year with the 3 (but actually only 2) person tent that we're using this year. The Outwell Arizona is a perfect full height dome for sleeping in but as the nights draw in and the dew turns heavy we're looking to sit inside out of preference and our little tent is not ideal. So, imagine my delight when I spotted an Outwell Covington 4 from their Privileged range sitting next to the Vango equivalent at our last campsite - the perfect opportunity to compare the two. We have Vango tents aplenty for our Guide unit - their 500 range is great for a patrol (although from experience it's always worth paying for the top of the range tents in terms of size and tunnel to dome construction) - but personally I'm committed to Outwell, you get what you pay for with camping equipment. The owner of the Covington only bought it last week and paid £250 in John's Camping International, cheaper than Amazon! Shall I, shan't I? We were set to pass a store in Brighton according to a quick Internet search ..... but they're closed on Sundays! post 'post' note - I rang them on Monday to be told that they sell Vango's but not Outwells!!

The 'possible showers' stayed with us for most of the morning so beach visiting on our coastal drive was swift! Newhaven, Peacehaven, Saltdean, Rottingdean ... the sun finally began to peep out as we approached Brighton and our farewell to East Sussex. We enjoyed warm sunshine on the little beach at Shoreham where we stopped for lunch and to visit the Lifeboat Station, we didn't stop for the planned launch in the afternoon deciding instead to press onto our campsite in Angemering to pitch the dripping tent so that we could be assured of a dry, aired tent for the night. 

Our new campsite is not unlike Kingsdown in that the ablution block is basic but functional and clean and the camping is across vast fields as opposed to neatly mown and delineated pitches. Fabulous. Except for the late afternoon/early evening wind. We need a big deep biscuit tin or equivalent to put our gas burner in, it doesn't like wind and lightweight tents are not safe to cook in. Even with Big Daddy the hench beach windbreak we can't get enough shelter from the wind.  Hmmm. So, we chose to pitch at the bottom of the field where the long grass appeared to be barely whispering compared to the almost horizontal grass in the middle of the field. Perhaps that helped, who knows, we went out for dinner!

If you're familiar with the lower site at our Girlguiding LaSER campsite at Cudham Shaws then you'll have an idea when I describe our walk to the toilets as the equivalent of walking from 'Lambeth' or 'Battersea' to the shower block. One needs to plan one's loo trips way in advance!

Sunday was visitors day; Tracey joined us as we pitched our tent and then came down to Littlehampton with us where we met Angela for our evening paddle and sandcastle building! I doubt that we're going to beat the 118 record set by Molly and Goddington Brownies at Greatstone. Angela stayed with us for the evening, narrowly winning the game crazy golf despite some ace shots from Nick! The delicious smells emanating from the pub as we'd parked in the early evening lured us back for a feast before a very dark return to our beds for the night.

Spot the beaches!

Peacehaven in the rain?

Ummm could this be Hove?

Shoreham - by the lifeboat house

Angela, Nick and Tracey celebrate building 6 sandcastles at Littlehampton

First photo of my awesome parascend at WS2013 - thank you Lauren!

Day 10 Bexhill to Birling Gap

Nick's blog

We went to Tesco's to buy stuff for lunch, then after that we went to Pevensey Bay. We went on the beach and mum went for a swim and I took photos to put onto the blog. After that we had lunch on the beach.

We bought postcards and went back to the car. Then we drove to Eastbourne and found Sovereign Harbour. Then we went to see Langley Point.

We didn't stop in Eastbourne because we couldn't find anywhere to park so we went to Beachy Head. We had an ice cream and we went for a walk, it was very scary at the cliffs. We saw lighthouses and we went to Birling Gap and the beach.

Then we went to Jan and Bob's house in Bexhill. We charged mum's iPad and put the fridge stuff in Jan's fridge and the freezer packs in the freezer. After that we went to the beach and met lots of guiding people from Bexhill and other places. I recognised Glyn and Derrick. We made pebble castles and LaSER out of pebbles and some people paddled in the sea, then we had a picnic dinner that everyone had brought with them. We were worried that the seagulls would eat the food but they didn't. Then the tide had gone out and there was sand so we made some soggy sandcastles.

Then we went back to Jan and Bob's to have coffee and to get the iPad and the cool box stuff. We came back to the campsite and had a glass of wine and went to bed. 

Mum in the sea at Pevensey Bay. She said it was very cold but I made her swim!

Beachy Head

Birling Gap

Bexhill-on-Sea

Day 9 Home to Bexhill-on-Sea

The BBCWeather App was spot on with the forecast yesterday so we found ourselves setting off from Wandsworth in light rain at 8.30am which would have us on target for even more rain by the time we got to Camber Sands around 10.30. Fortuitously for us, but not for the people concerned, we came upon an RTA on the A3 at Tolworth which delayed us by the best part of an hour. That delay coupled with a coffee stop in Maidstone had us arriving at Camber just as I was turning the windscreen wipers off. Only a few hardy souls had made it to the beach in the rain so as the sun came out we had the sea and sand almost to ourselves for an hour - a great welcome to East Sussex!

On to the pretty town of Rye after lunch on a quest to find Terry and Shane Haddon's celebrated fish shop 'Rye Fish Merchants'. Terry is well known in the Wimbledon area for his Friday fish stall and has won a top award in London's Time and Leisure, so well worth hunting out as we were driving through Rye anyway. They were easy to find on the road into Rye and with parking too. We bought a couple of bream and a bag of samphire - stuff of my childhood, collected from the marshes around Southport where I spent my teenage years, delicious eaten like asparagus with a bit of melted butter.

Decisions, decisions, shall we stay and explore Rye or move on to Winchelsea and Hastings? We made the wrong decision. It seems that traffic problems were set to challenge us for the day. It must be awful for those involved in road traffic accidents, I'm very fortunate not to have experienced one or had family or friends involved, however yesterday we were certainly affected by them! Our straightforward journey to Hastings via Winchelsea turned into quite an adventure. We tried taking the coast road only to discover that we were in fact on a Sustrans cycle/footpath and private road - the map said it was a road, it looked to be a great choice, it was just the signage that I found lacking!! Our whistle stop tour is giving me a real yearning to come back and explore the Kent/Sussex area in more detail - the marshes at Rye Harbour are full of wildlife and peaceful tranquility, a great place to walk or cycle but remember to take a pair of binoculars.

Back through Rye and a more northerly route choice which would bring us round into Hastings but missing out the beach at Winchelsea. Well, what a 'battle' we had around Hastings!! Road works galore!! All added to the adventure though and who knows what kind of time delay but we got to enjoy masses of very pretty Sussex countryside on our single track road detours, coupled with lots of other traffic driving the lanes for the first time and not experienced in reversing into passing places! 

Our beach tally was limited to 2 by the end of the day but never mind, the original aim of the trip was to get to know the coastal areas of the region and we certainly saw lots of East Sussex yesterday!

As we experienced on Romney Marsh, the wind got up to 12mph late afternoon/early evening but that wonderful BBC Weather app advised us that it would drop by 7.00,which it did, in time to BBQ our fish with a degree of safety. The BBQ then obligingly kept it's heat  and warmed us as the August evening chill set in - weird how folk on commercial campsites don't sing around campfires at dusk ..... isn't it???

Note for Molly - we got the tent pitched in 20 minutes, very hard ground for bashing the tent pegs in though, wish you'd been with us, you were really good at that job!

Nick with his first sandcastles of the trip at Camber Sands

Nick at Hastings

Our campsite on a farm at Bexhill. I want that bell tent behind us!

Day 8 Catch Up and Ready to Move On

Each time that we moved onto a different camp site Molly and I felt that we were going on another holiday and a new adventure. Coming home for a day in between travelling the coastline of Girlguiding Kent East and the Counties of Girlguiding Sussex East and Sussex West's coastline really does create a break. By my very rough reckoning I've travelled 121.5 miles along the coast from Sheerness to Dungeness and have another 120 miles to travel from Camber to West Wittering - I'm happy to stand corrected if anyone knows better!

Molly kept a tally of our first 6 nights away, in total we have:

• taken 80 minutes to pitch the tent
• driven 599.5 miles
• visited 14 beaches - but driven passed many more
• eaten 6 ice-creams each
• had 3 days with some rain
• built (with help!) 139 sandcastles
• found 2 geocaches
• visited 2 international Guide and Scout camps

I wonder what the next 5 nights away have in store?

Whilst I was away with Molly, Nick was enjoying a week in Greece with his sisters, Kate and Ali - plenty of R&R round the pool so he'll be ready for action this coming week! My husband Mac is a keen orienteer and spends a week or two each summer with the GB Junior Squad and coaching team in the Highlands of Scotland. A 6 day festival of orienteering either in Scotland or the Lake District follows which Nick and I usually join him for. This year he cut the '6 Day' short and left for the World Masters in the Italian  Alps as I was setting off for Kent. The reports coming in via text messages are of some very good results so far - brilliant runs in the sprint and hoping to qualify for the long races on Saturday. Nail biting stuff in the McKerrow household!

Moving on .......

We're going to be camping in Bexhill-on-Sea on Friday and Saturday, moving on to Angmering for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights.

The weather forecast for the next week doesn't look too bad - we'll probably be driving in rain tomorrow morning on our way down to Camber Sands and Rye but hopefully after that the rain showers will be few and far between.

I've taken the opportunity to ditch 'Useless' and to pick up the traditional and very robust old beach wind break, vital when camping by the sea. I've also swapped the leaking airbed for the hopefully intact one. We've packed a portable BBQ and aim to buy some fresh fish tomorrow which we'll stuff full of freshly picked herbs and chunks of lemon and serve with new potatoes and chargrilled courgettes - with any luck. I'm very fortunate that Nick enjoys fish so we'll be making the most of being by the sea again this week.

If you're down Sussex way in the next week then please do make contact: call or text me or email pipmck@girlguidinglaser.org.uk or Twitter @PipMcKerrow and meet us on a beach to attempt to beat Tuesday's record of 118 sandcastles on Greatstone beach with Goddington Brownies.

Day 7 Romney Marsh to home via WS2013

Not such a nice day and the tent was saturated with dew - no sun and very little wind, typical! We wanted to get away at 9.30am so I had to reconcile myself to the fact that the tent would be very wet and would require drying at some stage rather than being rolled up and stuffed into its bag for 2 days.

Molly was very helpful with all the packing up and we were soon ready for the off. We've enjoyed our 6 nights together but Molly was looking forward to seeing her mum again. Our rendez-vous point was the Gardener's Arms opposite the Sussex County Show Ground at Ardingly - a great pub if you're ever in the area, a good menu and superb service - a popular choice for Guide and Scout visitors to the camp in the afternoon. After Molly and my sister had left I grabbed an hour or so to catch up on some emails and to change into Guide Wear for my afternoon's visit.

WS 2013 International camp is a joint venture for Girlguiding and Scouts in West Sussex (including Girlguiding Sussex Central). This is the 9th camp that they've run over the past 30 years bringing together almost 2,000 young people, supported by 570 leaders and a further 450 volunteer staff running the central camp and activities.  Guides and Scouts from Argentina, Austria, Australia, British Guides In Foreign Countries, Canada, Denmark, Georgia, Germany,  Guernsey, Ireland, Jersey, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, St Lucia, Sweden, Spain and the USA have joined the week long camp of adventure and friendship.

After a welcome from the camp organisers, the VIP's were shown around the Ancient Civilisations themed camp and encouraged to join in the fun and fundraising in the bazaar. I had the great pleasure of presenting some of Girlguiding's top awards to members on the central stage in 'Camelot': BP Awards to Guides, a Leadership Qualification and our very top award for members under 26 - the Queen's Guide Award. Very many congratulations to you all and well done for all the hard work that you've put into achieving your award.

Whilst speaking to Eileen Burbidge, one of my predecessors in my role as Chief Commissioner for Girlguiding London and South East England, we spotted a parascender flying over the campsite. What a great opportunity for a new adventure, Eileen was full of support and enthusiasm for the challenge, everyone rallied round to make it possible and before I left at 7.30pm I'd flown over the camp strapped to a parachute. What an afternoon! Very many thanks to all of you involved in making the camp such a success for so many young people and their leaders and for your warm welcome to all the visitors.

       with Eileen and the two wonderful Guides who showed us around camp


If you're wondering what happened to the soggy tent .... I spread it out over the back of the car in an attempt to dry it off but later decided to pitch it in the car parking field. Just got it down and packed away as the dew started to fall. Phew!

Off home to repack and reprovision and to pick up Nick, my son and 2nd camping companion, for the Sussex leg of the trip.

Day 6 Romney Marsh

Another 'good to be alive' morning - we really are blessed with them on this trip. I spent the first hour or so of daylight lying in bed uploading photos and working through my emails. Remember, I've reset my body clock so we were in bed by 9.30 last night - can you believe it of me?? - which meant that by 6.00 am I'd had a long lie-in! 

We'd had an unsettling early evening at our new campsite when the wind had got up to such serious levels that the tent pegs were lifting out of the ground. We're using my trusty Outwell Arizona full height 2/3 person dome - the one that we completed 'a summer to remember' in last year. It's brilliant and 100% trustworthy, the challenge was the ground. We bashed pegs into soft ground with no 'hold' which was slightly alarming, so out came the backup even heavier duty pegs which then held the ground well. The tent bucked and rose with the wind but held fast. No chance of cooking without some serious shelter and 'U seless' wasn't about to get a 2nd chance so we retreated to a pub in Dymchurch. On our return to the campsite the wind had dropped considerably but my veteran camping companion, Molly, was understandably concerned about the possibility of the tent blowing away with us in it. Luckily, the wind soon abated and by morning we were becalmed (can you be becalmed on land?)       

We've hit lucky again with our campsite - I'll write a separate post at the end of the trip with details and reviews of all the sites that we've stayed in - this one is totally flat (can Guiding/Scouting boast any flat sites??), has a field of sheep and a resident donkey next to it, not to mention numerous bunnies and excellent loos, showers, washing up, fridge/freezers and even a washing machine. The pitches are well laid out around a central grassy area which fills with children of all ages playing all sorts of fun games together until dark - when we all go to bed! It's idyllic.

We met up with Carole, another local Guiding friend, today and headed straight off to her beach hut on Littlestone beach. I've always wanted to peep inside a beach hut and hear tales of how their owners use them and Carole certainly didn't disappoint me. What a delightful hut with all sorts of clever features including a loft space! Molly was excited by the inflatable 'biscuit',  we soon launched her off into the sea in but she had a heck of a shock when a wave propelled her back onto the shore with great force a couple of minutes later.

 Littlestone beach with Carole

























Dungeness beach

Carole is a committed Geocacher and keen to share her passion with Molly who was new to the activity, with an ever thoughtful mind to the concentration of a 9year old, Carole had us picking up caches within a very short space of time around Dungeness. I would have liked to have lingered a little longer and hear more about the history of the area but we needed to press on. Being a local, Carole knows where to park avoiding the necessary charges on beach car parks. Heading back towards Greatstone Guide HQ we crossed the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway line and were treated to a couple of steam trains passing us and also bumped into Carole's mum!

 



Goddington Brownies (the Ashford Goddington not Orpington one!) have been staying at Greatstone all week and met us on the beach for a picnic. What a great group of girls and leaders who were firmly ensconced in their pirate themed adventures, complete with digging for Captain Hook's buried treasure on the beach. We certainly struck our own gold with them and easily broke our sandcastle building record with their help - in no time at all we'd built 118 of them and stuck Rainbow, Brownie, Guide, The Senior Section, LaSER and Girlguiding London and South East England sandcastle flags in most of them. I wonder if Girlguiding Sussex East or Sussex West will be able to beat Kent East's record?

Eva Jones aged 10 from 1st Goddington Brownies has written a poem entitled Sandcastles and has given me permission to publish it here on my Coastal Camping blog:

Sandcastles big, tall and wide

get trampled on with one big stride.

Your heart is pounding will your masterpiece survive?

A tear rolls down your frosty cheek

and splashes the remains of

your long lost dreams away in the sky.

Don't fret, your mother says, sitting by your side

it's just another day at the seaside.

Well done Eva - what a masterpiece! Thank you.

Farewell to Goddington Brownies and a big thank you to Carole and we were off to visit a place from my childhood. At the end of the 50's early 60's, 'Pirate's Spring' in St Mary's Bay, was a Sunshine Home for Blind Babies. I have fond memories, from a very tender age, of visiting my aunt who was the head there before she moved to the Sunshine Home in Leamington Spa. Now part of The Springs Community for young adults with Aspergers and Autism I was fascinated to see how much I would remember from my childhood visits. Sadly not a lot. The building has been extended way beyond the original 30's but the blue sky and beach at the bottom of the garden were the same!

Back to the fairground in Dymchurch for Molly to indulge in a couple of rides and to spend some of her pocket money in a gift shop on another addition to her soft toy menagerie. 'Biscuit' the puppy will have a very good home I'm sure and I hope will remind Molly of our trip.

Last night's wind blew away the thunder bugs but they appear to have been replaced by a plague of earwigs. They don't bother Molly but I'll need to check that we leave them all behind before I continue the camping trip with Nick on Friday - he'll freak out at the sight of earwigs!

So, the final night of our Coastal Camping trip around Kent. We've met lots of Guiding friends on our travels - Rosemary and Carole kindly helped with the planning and joined us for part of the trip. Along the way we saw many familiar, and plenty of new, faces at Campdowne 2013, met Penny in the Coastguard pub in St Margaret's at Cliffe and loved our lunchtime meeting on Greatstone beach with Goddington Brownies. Molly has made innumerable friends at every campsite along the way and I've enjoyed the company of their parents and grandparents! I've definitely achieved the aim of the first part of this trip - to get to know the Kent coastline, such a large part of the our boundary of our Guiding region.

     

a seashell message - turn your head sideways to read it!!

118 sandcastles - well done Brownies!

our last evening meal together

Day 5 Deal to Romney Marsh

 

Having just completed her circular pebble design, Molly discovered a pebble 'hedgehog'

 

Flags in a row on the beach at Deal

Interested in the history of Romney Marsh? http://www.theromneymarsh.net/

Molly's Blog:

On Day 5 I helped Pip pack and went down the hill to play with my new friends Hannah and Lisa. We played Mr Funny Face the board game while Pip took down the tent and packed everything in the car. We went to Rosemary's and had lunch and I played in the garden, climbed a tree and played with toys on the shelf. 

On the way to Rosemary's we went to the beach in Deal and put our flags in the pebbles.

Then we went to the new campsite, the sign said 'Mrs Pip' where we had to put our tent. We met a lady and her grandson Linda and Bill. I made a zoo using tent pegs and string and animals that are stones in the shape of animals. Thunder bugs covered everything. After we put up the tent the wind nearly blew it away so we put extra pegs in. The thunder bugs had disappeared with the wind. We had to go out for our evening meal because the wind was too strong to light the gas and it was too dangerous.


Molly got to be a dab hand at assembling the table

When we got back I met some children and we played Cops and Robbers.


Molly's 'zoo' - constructing sheltered enclosures for her pebble animals

Day 4 Kingsdown and Campdowne 2013

Woke up to a beautiful sunny morning, what is it about blue skies, sun shine and the gentle sounds of waves breaking on the shingle and seagulls screeching at 6.00am? It can't fail to instil a sense of 'good to be alive-ness'. What a dew though! I can't say that I've been aware of heavy dews this year either at home in London or on earlier camping trips - we went to bed with a hefty layer and woke up to puddles of it!

Rosemary and I were up with the larks - well wood pigeons in the woods behind our tents. The campsite is great, basic but with flush loos and showers that were probably plentiful enough for Scouts a few years ago but are now stretched almost beyond limit by it's current users, many of whom also decided to go for an early morning ablution resulting in queues for showers at 7.00am on a Sunday! I read an article in The Guardian the other day about how camping helps us to reset our body clocks in accordance with day

Iight- it's certainly resetting ours -  no attempts to clear my emails at 1.00am, we're sound asleep by 11.00pm. Seems that we're not the only ones with many campers on this site getting up with the sun.

The 19 Counties in Girlguiding London and South East England are very varied in terms of geographical size, we managed to clock up 160mile round trip to Campdowne 2013 (near Orpington) and we were still within Kent, albeit having travelled through 3 guiding Counties.  In sharp contrast my home County of London South West stretches approximately 10 miles along is length from Putney to Waterloo.

Campdowne 2013 is a 10 day international Scout camp, held every 4 years at Downe, one of their national campsites. 1,200 Scouting and Guiding participants from 21 different countries are taking part this year and I was privileged to be invited to join them for Carnival Day. This was Molly's first experience of an event on this scale but I'm fairly confident that it won't be her last! We were delighted to be hosted by Abi and Philippa from Orpington Guides and Rangers who were complete stars and took us on a tour of the sub camps pointing out lots of different activities on the way. I met many members from our Region as well as Guides from across the UK and was especially pleased to chat to the New Zealand Guide contingent who all camped at Tui 12 the NZ jamboree that I visited last year.

What a great opportunity Guiding and Scouting offers to our young people in terms of adventure, cooperation and friendship. National and international camps and jamborees abound not only across the UK but across the world and only due to the generosity of our volunteers who give so much of their time and expertise to ensuring the very best experiences for everyone. If you are a member of Guiding or Scouting and haven't experienced a large scale event like this yet then look around and book yourself on one for next year, either as part of the volunteer service crew or as a leader taking some of your young people.

Our final stop before we left Campdowne was to a warm welcome from the London Over the Border contingent for tea and scones  - thank you Janice et al, delicious! Molly and her new found friend, Amy, become avid badge collectors by the end of the day. Molly has requested a camp blanket for her teddy for her birthday having seen baby Erin's camp blanket! Something for me to do on my Sussex leg of the Coastal Camping trip then!

Very many thanks to Ben, Emma and your wonderful crew for hosting all the visitors - what a great day!

We headed back east to Deal wondering when we'd pick up a 3G signal and decent enough phone reception to ring Lee, Molly's dad , to wish him a happy birthday - imagine my consternation when we ultimately picked one up at St Margaret's-at-Cliffe ...... welcoming us to France! Apologies Lee that you had to wait for your birthday call until we were safely back in England!

We stopped off for a pub meal at the 'Coastguard' in St Margaret's - right on the beach, under the famous white cliffs, what a delightful spot to be at sunset with very few people around. Tipping up in our Brownie/Leader wear was a bit of a giveaway I guess, staff member Penny was keen to find out what we'd been up to and we swiftly established that she's a Brownie Leader in Ramsgate. I'm sure that all customers at the Coastguard get excellent service but Penny and her team were exceptional. I can highly recommend the menu too, my plaice and new potatoes were cooked to perfection and the ubiquitous mixed leaf salad was nicely jazzed up by the addition of a couple of slices of perfectly ripe nectarine and a drizzle of decent dressing. Molly plumped for a child sized portion of cod and chips, also perfectly cooked and presented. We certainly didn't need to indulge in the ice cream sundae menu ..... but we did! No sign of the usual pub fayre desserts, my indulgence was Kentish apples with salted caramel, crumbled flapjack and vanilla ice cream whilst Molly 'smelled heaven' when she was give full rein with the bubblegum, strawberry and raspberry sauces over her ice cream with sprinkles.

I reckoned that a dip in the sea after that lot was off the cards so we settled for unsuccessful pebble skimming but a rather more successful pebble hurling competition!

Back to camp at Kingsdown - where has everyone gone? Very few tents remaining and all quiet at 10.00 pm! 

 

Molly trying her hand at Morris Dancing!

Molly and Penny at the Coastguard pub in St Margaret's-at-Cliffe

The famous ice-cream sundae!

More sandcastle flags in the pebbles, this time at St Margaret's-at-Cliffe as the light fades

Day 3 Herne to Deal

Rude awakening at 2.05am as the rain lashed down,  the sky lit up with lightening and thunder rolled around us. The first gust of wind swiftly demolished a structure sold to us as a 'wind break' but was quickly renamed as 'useless'. Unfortunately as rain was not forecast, I'd left our wet weather gear in the car, but fortunately rain in reality is never quite as bad is sounds from inside the tent. 'Useless' had taken the aluminium table, gas burner and kettle with it and thrown them against the tent creating an almighty racket that would have been enough to wake the whole campsite if they hadn't already been woken by the storm. The guy lines remained firmly tethered and held well down by the tent pegs so it was a question of hastily removing the poles, taking the table apart and shoving them all -lock, stock and barrel - under the car before disappearing at great speed back into the tent. The storm probably only lasted about 20 minutes but it was quite an adventure and apparently Molly's first experience of rain from inside a tent!

A fond farewell to friends for Molly and we were off by mid morning. A perfect campsite for our purposes and one that was popular with many of the other campers, some of whom were in for the long haul. One couple camp there in their tent for 2 or 3 months each year, only setting back off home to Whitby at the beginning of October - a good solution for those wishing to visit their offspring without imposing on their homes.

Our tent was still wet when we started pitching it at lunchtime at Kingsdown near Deal but soon dried off in the wind and hot sunshine. Molly quickly made friends with our new neighbours - Ruby and Tilly - whilst I set up camp and thought that I might get to read the paper. What a view! We camped in a massive field, part of a former Scout campsite now privately owned and open to members of the public as well as Scout, Guide and other groups with a stunning view of the English Channel - who could ask for more!

We were soon joined by Rosemary, a guiding friend of mine, who arrived with a BBQ and the wherewithall for  a delicious BBQ supper and 'camp doughnuts' to share with our neighbours.

The campsite boasts a direct pathway to the beach, a very popular draw for many campers - and us! Rosemary led the way and we were soon budond sandcastle s and racing tohd the rapidly advancing tide back in a predictably impossible battle! 

Molly and Rosemary at Kingsdown

..... and the race against the tide

......go back!!!

Going, going ......