On the road again

After a couple of days recovering from the Luxembourg leg of our trip, as it were, we’ve now begun the next stage: tenting our way around England for about three weeks. The idea of tenting rather than going to places where we have a proper roof over our head has been debated for a few weeks; Celia wants to save money and certainly this approach will help. But I’m not the world’s most enthusiastic tent person. Especially when it means we have to set up every night in a new place and take down every morning.
Well, tonight’s the first night, and we managed to get into a caravan/holiday home place by a river in a village called Huntingford Abbots. (Yes, I know.) The village is full of old thatched roof houses, and some more modern ones that fit into the scheme of things, and it’s very quiet. It’s near the town of Huntingdon.
We came here via Newmarket, a place that was a bit of a disappointment. Probably not Newmarket’s fault at all, but having read so many Dick Francis books in which it appears, and listening at the moment on a cassette in the car to yet another of Francis’ Syd Halley stories, perhaps my expectations were too high. I didn’t think there was much atmosphere in Newmarket, and I only saw one jockey the whole time we were there. Perhaps we should have gone there to see the races, as I’d suggested a while ago.
We were going to check in at a camping site nearer to Newmarket, but we noticed in the book as we were heading there that we couldn’t park our car beside our tent. Which would have been painful when it came to hoisting all the gear out of the car and into the tent, or when we were cooking and so on. As it is we seem to have taken over the place.
Anyway, tomorrow night we have to be in London (New Malden, to be precise, which is more like Kent than London proper) and we’ll be sleeping in a real bed there. So we’ll hardly have got used to tenting than we’ll be back to ‘normality.