Rosedale Abbey

Now, you may think that I start all posts about camping trips with "We weren't entirely sure about the weather....", but in this case it really was true!

The forecast was for 24 hours of two-raindrop (BBC levels) rain, including 3 hours of one-snowflake and 3 hours of two-snowflake snow. The temperature ranged from 0 to 8 degrees. That's pretty extreme, even for us!

But we went! How crazy are we?!

But, of course, it was fun. Yes, it started raining as we arrived at Rosedale Abbey after school on Friday and stopped the constant onslaught at about 10am the next morning. The stove in the tipi may have helped a little! The rest of Saturday was filled with snowshowers and rainshowers. So we went for a walk. We went up over the high moor and it looked like this:

Then we went down into the Goathland Valley and walked along the swollen Esk though woods and fields, and watched passing steam trains.

Sometimes it was sunny, sometimes it was hailing and sometimes it snowed. Yes, that is a 7-month old you can see being carried in a sling - I said we were mad. We had a well deserved pint and scone and chips in the over-heated pub and were all very happy.

Next day the sun was shining and we were able to take pictures of our camp next to Lake Brazier that had appeared in the we-didn't-think-it-was-that-low dip right next to us:

And Nathaniel started on his quest. All weekend he had been border-line whinging because he wanted to get onto the island in the middle of the stream that ran alongside the site.

However, the stream was so swollen that at times it looked like churned Guiness (yep - brown with white froth), or posssibly Coca-cola. And there was no way that kids were going to be allowed to wade in that. But by Sunday, I was able to wade carefully to the island without getting any water over the top of my size 8 wellies, so Nathaniel decided it was fair game.

He was almost right. He's got pretty tall wellies, and some careful measuring established that there was only about a metre that was too deep for him, and the flow was dropping rapidly. He was quite convincing that he wouldn't get washed away. So I lifted him over the high bit and put him down in the shallow bit and let him walk across, first to the other side of the stream and then accross to the island with all sorts of warnings about getting washed away. And then, because he had the tallest wellies, he was shipwrecked on the island while I took the wellies back for the next 7 year-old. 20 minutes later there were 3 shipwrecked marriners.

They search for wild animals, and D made a spear for spearing fish, but they weren't able to hunt for their supper, so we had to create system for sending over provisions.

It wasn't ideal - we were lacking length in some of our rope, but it worked. Then the younger members of our party wanted to join in, so I piggy-backed them accross, put some more provisions into the bag and abandoned them. We struck camp and it was very quiet for 45 minutes. How peaceful!

I think we'll do more shipwrecking in the future.....