Saturday
It was a reasonably non-dramatic day for a change and therefore, this blog is a quiet (and maybe uninteresting?) one. However, I do hope the reader still enjoys it. Selfishly, the blogs are to help me with my memory and not yours anyway!!
We survived the night and in fact slept well. The geese remained quiet throughout the night and Mr Axeman and/or Mrs PPE didn’t pay us a visit. Whilst Mel put the bedding away, I headed for a shower and quickly wished I had opted for a wash in Ethel instead. It was freezing! Not the shower itself, in fact the water was lovely and hot, but the cubicle wasn’t heated, and I could see rather a lot of the outside world above the door.
It was a reasonable size and had a couple of hooks on the back of the door to hang up clothes but there wasn’t a shelf to get everything off the floor. This was problematic as my shoes got slowly wetter. In the end, I opted to put my pyjama bottoms back on instead of my jeans and rushed back to Ethel where I duly warned Mel about the Icelandic ice shower. Not that she listened and about 10 minutes later she too rushed back and put the heating on.
By now there wasn’t time for the normal fry up, so I was unhappily relegated to toast and Marmite which leads to a question about bread. Mel had sensibly bought half a loaf of bread, but I wondered why a half loaf has half size slices? We just wanted fewer slices but still the normal size – not baby size. Clearly this is worth a debate at some point.
Anyway, after consuming two miniature pieces of toast, we planned to head off to visit Mel’s aunt and uncle who lived in Honiton. We were only 10 minutes from their house so thought a taxi was the best option as it would save us having to pack up Ethel. I began calling the local taxi firms without any success as each time I called, I was asked where we wanted to go to and from but as soon as I informed them, suddenly they were too busy.
As a taxi was out of the question, we duly got Ethel ready to leave but before I got into the driving seat, we spent some time pondering the issue of where to park once we are close to where Mel’s relatives lived. In the end, we parked in Tesco’s car park and walked – all the time hoping we didn’t get a ticket.
We had a lovely time and enjoyed a catch-up with cup of tea, biscuits and good conversation but as ever, even though I had been to their house before, I didn’t have any recollection of the occasion and so it was like visiting new people for me.
After a couple of hours, we decided to go into the town for a look round and so faced the problem of parking. Sat nav lady told us to go to Silver Street car park as there was room for motorhomes but sat nav lady clearly hasn’t been to Devon and doesn’t know about the tiny lanes – even in the towns. We found Silver Street and the panic started to creep in – there was absolutely no way I was going to drive down a lane which was only 2 inches wider than Ethel. I promptly threw a strop whilst Mel sat quietly and suggested we headed back to the site. But that made me even more determined to find somewhere to park.
However, I know my limitations and announced we would have one more go at it and wondered whether Silver Street had another entrance. We turned around and headed back into town. And a miracle happened! On the high street there was a bay long enough for us to park in. Even better, it was free and even better than that, it was limited to one hour which therefore limited how much time Mel had for shopping!
Honiton seems to just have one road with all the shops on it, so we walked up one side and back down the other. It had quite a few charity shops which Mel perused while I did the normal standing outside playing on my phone. Before long we were back at the van and heading back to the site.
We had a couple of hours before going back out for dinner with Rory and Elizabeth and took the time to watch a bit of telly quietly. However, we ended up with some excitement close by. Remember me saying we were parked in a small car park? It soon became smaller. Firstly, another motorhome about the same size as Ethel arrived. After a bit of going forward and backwards, it too joined us parking on the other side of the concrete. Then, a little bit later a car towing the worlds smallest (and cutest) caravan arrived. This would have been fine had it been a van, but towing is a different matter. There simply wasn’t enough room to reverse with us on one side and the other motorhome on the other. In the end, the caravan had to be uncoupled and manually pushed until it was facing back up the track. To make it harder, by now it was pitch black. Mel and I didn’t want to gawp but needed to leave as Rory and Elizabeth were about to arrive, so we squeezed past the caravan and embarrassed owners and headed up the track in the dark.
We had a lovely meal and when we arrived back at the site, we noticed the little caravan perched on top of the hill in the dark – we have no idea how they managed to get there and hope they made it through the night!
2LadiesTravelling 