Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Day 240/365: Lake District holiday: St Bees

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 20:28:48 GMT

We drove up to St Bees during the camping portion of our Lake District holiday and spent a day romping on the beach below the cliffs. We arrived about an hour before low tide, which gave us a chance to enjoy the full extent of the sand before it was swallowed up again by the sea.

Keiki, bloke and Humuhumu head toward the sea, with newly purchased rock-pooling nets in hand.

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Day 210/365: Oxwich Bay, South Wales

Sun, 29 Jul 2018 19:46:08 GMT

Family photo on the beach at Oxwich Bay.

The tide was going out when we started our walk from the Oxwich Bay Hotel, where we'd indulged ourselves with the cooked breakfast we hadn't been able to cook at the campsite. At first the children wanted to stay relatively close to the sea wall. Eventually the prospect of finding more live crabs and clams lured them further out into the wind, and we went out to the water, which continued retreating rapidly.

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Day 209/365: Camping trip aborted

Sat, 28 Jul 2018 19:39:53 GMT

This is the "view" through the front windscreen of our car for much of the afternoon. It normally takes about 3.5 hours to drive from south Wales back to the UK Midlands. It took us almost five to get home. I think the bloke was doing about 30 mph when I took this, due to the poor visibility and water sheeting across the road. And then it started to hail.

This was taken about an hour and a half earlier as we left Oxwich Bay, near our campsite. The condition of the sky in the photo is not representative of the majority of the weather we experienced there. The gale force winds and rain that had been predicted for the weekend arrived 24 hours early, and this was a very brief respite from the storm, which we used to visit the beach we'd come to see. The tent belonging to the friends who'd come to the campsite with us blew down at 3 AM this morning. They were forced to break it all down, repack the car and drive home with their kids (who are the same age as ours). I spent the rest of the night vividly reliving the sleepless, terrified hurricane experiences I'd gone through as a child in Hawai'i.

More photos from Oxwich Bay to follow tomorrow, but in the meantime, I'm going to enjoy being warm, dry, and in a bed that doesn't get lifted off the ground by the storms outside.

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Day 208/365: Friday's Unscientific Poll: Packing

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 11:57:22 GMT

Yes, I have reduced this to a binary choice. I realise not everyone will feel as passionately about this as I do, and there may even exist some strange folk who are utterly indifferent to packing. But I had to pack today, and am therefore having Strong Feelings about packing.

View Poll: Packing

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Ice cream gang in Devon

Wed, 30 Aug 2017 17:12:54 GMT

Hello, I'm not so good at posting this week, due to it having been a bank holiday weekend which was also possibly the last gasp of summer, the bloke returning home from Nairobi and us turning around immediately afterward to go camping in Devon, and then back to drowning in work. We actually have some hardware in our hot little hands for the Engineering Model of our instrument for the JUICE spacecraft, and orders being placed for more, and that feels good.

I want to write up the camping weekend properly but for now, a preview from the dairy farm's ice cream stand.

From left to right: S, Humuhumu, Keiki and S's younger brother J*, sitting on a simple wooden bench eating ice cream in cones. Backdrop is the beautiful Devonshire countryside.

* J, believe it or not, is only a few months older than Keiki. He is enormous.

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