Friday needed to be at a slightly more leisurely pace after all that and as cousin M was better, we decided to meet up with Joe and the girls at Castle Drogo. (LOVE National Trust membership, worth every penny!) Had a somewhat torturous trip up there; it’s a very, VERY narrow lane and quite stepp coming from the side we were on and someone was half way up and comprehensively stuck in a motorhome. Huffed a bit as we were the ones directly behind and various people got irate or went up to help cars get past; in the end, he got stuck again and i went up to let him know he was really going to have to be the one to move next as there simply wasn’t room. It then became obvious that he was a gentleman who had, i’d guess, become a widower in the last year and had bought a motorhome and decided to go off on tour. He was a bit flustered 🙁 So we were nice, helped him out a bit and when we all got to Castle Drogo, i flapped over him for a bit and probably annoyed him greatly and then we left him recuperating! I felt a bit bad for huffing though.
After that, we had a REALLY NICE DAY. (Look, a “really” and a “nice” all in one 3 word sentence!)
Playing in the trees. (I’ve got that grainy problem again, i’m gonig to have to read the manual.)
Amelie being a bit B list celebrity.
Cousin M – same age as Amelie, a whole different sort of girl!
Doing the history trail.
Being gorgeous.
Lovely time. I sunbathed after all that, i seemed to be ridiculously tired all week, and Max and Joe took all the girls in the castle for another trail and a nosey. Then i sat with them while they played and amused myself people watching. One elderly couple stood by me quite openly discussing the 6 girls and trying to work out which belonged together. They settled on Iz, Maddy, M and Amelie being sisters, with M and Amelie as twins and Fran being the second oldest (Iz is taller but younger in fact) and being sibling only to Josie.
I enjoyed telling them how wrong they were; i don’t think they realised they’d been stood right over me while discussing my brood 😉 😆
Iz – didn’t get a good one of her really.
Finished off the day paddling at Postbridge. It was one of those incredibly deeply sunny late afternoons; the photos seem to have come out all 1970’s slide-ish, not sure why. Lovely though.
Then went off to forage for dinner and ended up at excellent chip shop in Tavistock, which was having a Balloon Festival. Impossible to get a decent photo, at least, impossible if you are me, but i did love the way they were just appearing from the end of the street. Very surreal.
Got impossibly lost on the way home, which reduced us all to complete hysterics. Set off towards the campsites landmark, Dingles Steam Village, which was helpfully signposted right from Tavistock (where we’ve decided we’d quite fancy living) and then managed to lose our bearings in the last few miles when we realised we actually only know how to get back to it if we come from the A30 and are otherwise clueless as to its actual geographic position. It takes some doing for Max to get as lost as i can, that’s for sure, but we had NO IDEA where we were, except that we were, without fail, always 2 1/2 miles from a hamlet called Germansweek 😆
Got home eventually, very, very late.
