Rutland

After the general sucess of our trips to the Manifold Valley and Shropshire, and the general fullness of our diaries, we decided some time ago to put a date for a camping weekend in our and James and Beth's diaries. The advance date was made even more complicated by the fact that at the time we would have one extremely, and one somewhat, pregnant people in the party.

But it worked a treat. Everyone was sufficiently mobile for camping and the weather not only obliged, but was downright encouraging. We decided that it wasn't a weekend for scaling the heights of fells and mountains, so met in the middle in Rutland.

It was a glorious weekend. The sun shone and the breeze was light (rubbish for sailing) and refreshing. We did a great deal of not much.

We sat in our campsite (a holiday park for the rugged Boden set - "few" facilities in a some fields by a country house - luxury for us!), and ate and chatted and bimbled.

We went down to Rutland Water and watched a keel boat make absoutley no head way while we did some more eating and chatting and gently sauntering along and Nathaniel did enthusiastic scooty-biking and pestilence chasing.




(Don't let the photos fool you - it was baking hot. The rest of us were over-heating in t-shirts, but N refused to take off his favourite jumper!)

We sat in sandstone country pubs and drank beer in their coiffured gardens.

We sat around the glowing embers of our barbeque all night, watched people send up chinese latterns, and admired the view of the milky way with so little night-glow.

Nathaniel poddled and enjoyed being outside. James taught him how to play boules, and we only had one near-miss involving heads and heavy boules.



As ever, just normal camping equipment provided hours of amusement:





It was a wonderfully relaxing weekend (with pretty much no photos!). But our brains are struggling to imagine what next year's incarnation will be like. Our party of 5 will have turned into 7 with two crawlers!