A couple of days in the sun.

It dawned on us recently that we hadn't had a holiday, just the three of us, without it involving visiting other family members, since R was born.  We were never big on foreign holidays anyway.  A week abroad every couple of years was plenty for us.  City breaks were the norm.  Other than that, our only holidays away from visiting relatives, were usually tagged onto family visits.

One thing that we had really enjoyed was camping.  It started with our childhood family holidays to the New Forest or North Wales, moved onto festivals and back full circle to the Yorkshire Dales.  We had finally got our perfect tent (three man with an awning for our gear), two stoves, thermal sleeping mats, decent sleeping bags.  We hadn't gone mad, but we could cope from Spring into Autumn.  Then, of course, pregnancy occurred, R turned up, and camping was shelved. 

As well as the pressures of dealing with a premature baby we had the added self-inflicted pressure of living far from our families.  Granny lives in Edinburgh while Nanna lives in Windsor.  A 4 hour drive in either direction means that we can't just pop over for Sunday lunch.  Even a weekend trip seams a little daft so most of our annual leave entitlement involves either the M1 or A1 for hours at a time.

This weekend however we decided to make some time for ourselves and try to rekindle our love affair with camping.  Gone is the 3 man tent in favour of a family friendly 6 man tent, giving us space for more family members in the future.  The stoves have been augmented with a portable barbecue and our thermal sleeping mats have been replaced by a queen sized airbed as Z is demanding her creature comforts.  What could go wrong.

If you hadn't noticed, this weekend was the August Bank Holiday weekend and, in England, that means one thing and one thing only, rain.  I had checked the weather forecast in advance so this came to no real surprise.  We had taken an emergency "pop up" tent with us for R to shelter in while we shouted, swore and got soaked to the bone.  The combination of the torrential summer rain, coupled with a brand new tent that we hadn't erected before, made for an entertaining half an hour.  Of course, with the tent up, the rain eased off.  R quickly made himself comfortable, spread some toys into every corner of the tent and set about exploring the five meters of canvas that was to be our home for the next two nights.

 

The rain didn't stop until the middle of the night.  That didn't stop me from lighting the barbecue, nor did it stop us from finding the steep path down from the cliff to camp site to the beach.  We explored the ruins of the second world war pillboxes that had fallen from their elevated positions to become high tide homes for stranded sea creatures.  Z even found a fossil although I'm not sure what it's a fossil of.

The next morning we woke to discover a flaw in our bargain tent.  With the wind in the right direction rain was being blown under one of the ventilation windows and into R's bedroom.  Luckily he was sleeping at one side of the room so didn't wake up in a puddle.  The rain had at least stopped, but the clouds hung to the site like the barnacles which covered the pillboxes.  We made the decision to leave our tend and explore Filey, somewhere that I had been to a couple of times but neither Z or R had had the pleasure of.

 

We had made the right decision.  A ten minute drive later and we were in brilliant sunshine, paddling in the sea, building sandcastles and eating fish and chips.  The only down side to our day trip was that R had his first encounter with a wasp.  We were worried because his grandfather, Poppa John, is allergic to wasps but happily it looks like that particular gene hasn't been passed down the line.

Back at the site the weather had finally lifted.  Now that we could see past the end of our guy ropes R started to get brave.  Just how far away from the tent and from us could he get?  We were all happy as long as we could see each other, it was only when he rounded the side of a tent a couple of hundred meters away that I put my running practise in to use and shepherded him back where we could see him again.

Our second night passed without a hitch.  Putting R to bed and having to stay around the tent meant that we could spend plenty of quality time together.  We played cards, chatted and managed that rarest of things, an early night and eight hours of sleep.  The next morning we were woken by what passes for the dawn chorus on camp sites, families screaming at each other as one child complained that their sibling was in their part of the tent.  The mothers attempt to calm things down was even louder and more shrill than the original complaint.  I'm glad it wasn't us but it made for a reminder of things hopefully to come.

We packed up our tent and made our way home happy in the knowledge that we had survived our first family holiday.  We had also rekindled our love affair with pitching a tent and sleeping under canvas.  Best of all R had a great time.  In his words "I love camping." and with those words spinning around my head I'm already planning our next camping adventure.