Buckland and Bude.

Which does sound rather like a firm of solicitors I think.

As is usual, we made use of our National Trust membership. If you are a large family, days out with individual entry are just prohibitively expensive but NT membership means we can drop in and out of places without feeling we must squeeze every drop out of it if not everyone is in the mood for educational stuff. While normally we slope to somewhere near, like Castle Drogo, this time we made a change and headed off to Buckland Abbey. Neither of Max or I had been there and we knew it was the home of Francis Drake, so we suspected it would tick boxes. The Mifi was handy again as we (Max!) got a bit lost and we also wanted to see if another place was nearby. O2 coverage is just too slow and patchy in Devon for useful map and app use.

The grounds were lovely (the cafe the scene of the blog last week) and the great barn amazingly huge. We couldn’t imagine it filled with food really. The apple press caused Maddy and Max to make plans for Lego builds and indoors there was a really good film, artefact display and loads of interested and helpful people to talk to. The top floor was very hands on and the girls loved the dressing up, though they giggled a bit at what their Kentwell-y friends would have thought.

We stopped off at Bellever on the way home. it was as lovely as it always is 🙂

In order to fulfill Josie’s list, we needed a beach day. My childhood holidays were 90% beach days but it doesn’t seem to be my kids thing in such intensity. One day essential though and we managed to find crabs, anemones, barnacles, mussels, limpets and sea sails. I loafed, they wave jumped and built sand castles. I LOVED being able to blog from the beach 😆

Pregnant bump woz ‘ere.

Another lovely couple of days 🙂