First stop: Waitaki Waters

We haven't been on a tenting holiday since 2007, when we camped in a number of place in the UK.   At that time I blogged about the trip day by day (pretty much); this time, on a trip around some of the South Island, I kept notes on an iPad, and will use these as a basis for posts relating to this most recent holiday.   We were trying to do the holiday as economically as possible, since neither of us are earning anything, and mostly survive on the superannuation.  I'm not sure that we entirely succeeded in this, but in general we kept expenses down.  Part of our expense-reducing process was reverting to the use of the tent for accommodation.  This was only partly successful, as you'll discover as you read on through these posts.

Many of the places mentioned won't be familiar to some readers, so I'll try and put links in to assist.


6.11.12 First day of the holiday.

The tent up, and ready for business with
the power cord attached to its pole. 

We'd decided to head for Waitaki Waters camp as our first port of call on the way to Christchurch (where we were due to attend a 60th birthday a few days later), and left home about 1.30 after a couple of false starts.  We stopped off at Waikouaiti beach where it was very sunny but there was a nasty chilly wind coming off the sea.  However it was good to have a break and I dozed for a few minutes, which I needed - I'd had quite a busy morning taking someone to the Eye Department at the Hospital.  I don't know that we've ever been to that part of the beach before, only the part down by the racetrack.  It's certainly lovely and would be a good spot when the wind wasn't so fierce.

The manager/owner at Waitaki Waters is Australian though he sounds English; seemingly a lot of people have commented on this.  His father is Australian born but his mother was Eastern European, which maybe has given his speech a bit of a tang.  The camp-site is beautifully clean and tidy; probably one of the best I've seen in this regard.  We camped on a fairly spacious bit of ground - there weren't many people staying - and got the tent up fairly easily, considering we're rather out of practice.  It was very hot by this stage and I thought it was going to be stuffy sleeping in the tent but in fact even with sleeping bags and a blanket each we were both cold on and off during the night.

We met a German couple while they were making their dinner.  The man's English was very good, and we talked about places we'd been in Germany, though I had to think hard to remember which ones they were!  Celia was very tired and was in bed by 8.30 at least.  I read for a while until the moths attacking the tent trying to get at the light got too annoying.  We'd walked the 800 metres down to the beach and found that an enormous bank of river pebbles had been deposited there. Our assumption was that they were to keep the sea from swamping the place.  There must have been tens of millions of them and we presumed they'd all been brought in a truckload at a time.  The tide was high and crashed up against them.

However, I discovered later, in Geraldine, that these pebbles are natural and have always been there. They may have been shored up a bit to keep the tides at bay, but otherwise that's a naturally pebbly beach.  The person who told me this, a volunteer working on the riverside garden in Geraldine, said he was originally from a place further south where they had sandy beaches (as we do in Dunedin, of course), which he much preferred. He also made the interesting remark, in relation the flooding of the river in Geraldine – which was what he was helping to clean up – that every town with a river has a history.  I can believe it, especially if the river is only metres away from the shops and other buildings.

Just resting

The last couple of days have been rest days – mostly. Both of us were zonked when we got back from our tenting trip, more tired than we’d been for weeks. The tiredness had kind of crept up on us both, and we were both irritable, and just plain weary of traveling and erecting and de-erecting tents.

It’s nice to be back to a bit of normality at our ‘base camp’ and to have some people to talk to. In the campsites it’s been amazing how few people there have been who’ve stopped and talked, or showed any interest in us. Which means we’ve been thrown back on each other for all our resource: we both need other company as well as each other.

We’re now going to plan our train trip in the five European countries in more detail than we originally intended, because part of the problem with the tenting holiday was just not knowing where we might end up, and whether we’d have somewhere to stay. It meant that a certain side of the trip was unrelaxing, and almost unenjoyable.

Camp sites

The variation in camps is enormous. I still haven’t quite figured out the difference between the official Camp and Caravanning Association sites, where we get a little booklet stamped (ten stamps and a free night!) and where we get senior citizen discounts (even Celia) and where it costs virtually nothing for being here, and the sites where we pay twice the price, and where there are signs saying CACA people welcome and where the friendliness is far less. Oh, well, we’ll only be camping a few more days, and so the problem won’t bother me after that.
Some camps you have to pay for showers, some require a key to get into the toilets (!), some have laundry facilities, some have virtually no facilities - like the one the night before last near Chester, where there was one urinal and one WC for the men, one shower and one hand basin. Two WCs for the women, a shower and a hand basin. No hot water for washing up dishes. And other places, like the one here in Kidderminster, has so many showers and toilets and urinals and basins that you have to stop and choose which to use. It’s a bigger site, certainly, but not that much bigger.
And then there’s electric power. Most people can plug into a socket in the middle of the field and get their power from it. There may be a dozen of these units, with four sockets each, scattered around. Here at Kidderminster, we can’t get at one, unfortunately, so this may be the last message you get for a while…
But there is a ping-pong table here, so if you don’t hear from us, that’s probably what we’re doing. And resting.

One of those days

Saturday. Left Chester around lunchtime, visited Oswestry (which may be pronounced Ostry, but don‘t bank on it) and arrived in Kidderminster. Didn’t really explore Chester’s Cathedral or City Walls, or Oswestry‘s more interesting haunts. Did explore op shops and supermarkets. Bought a pair of waterproof boots for £7.99 in one of the op shops, as my other pair of shoes are letting the water through. Arrived in camp near Kidderminster, exhausted. All this setting up house, cooking meals over a gas stove, getting up in the morning, cooking meals over a gas stove, taking house down again, packing car so that everything gets fitted in, and driving somewhere, and then starting the whole process over has worn us out.

Not to Crowle yet

We set out this morning to go to Crowle. We are fated not to go to Crowle as yet.
Both of us woke up early - around six - and we finished up getting up not much later. It takes virtually three hours to get ourselves sorted out in the morning when we’re tenting. Three different locations in two tents in four days. Certainly the new tent allowed us to stand upright - a great joy for homo erectus - and after we’d had tea, we sat inside and read - or blogged, as in my case.
The site was quieter than the one the night before, but there was still an ongoing motor cavalcade hum going on in our left ears.
Anyway, we began heading towards Crowle, and found that the Sat Nav seemed to be taking us in a rather long way round route, which required us to go towards Birmingham, virtually, before we went south again. The day wasn’t that exciting in terms of the weather, and we read on one of the electronic road signs that there was some blockage with long queues on the road we were about to take, and I was feeling too tired to cope with dragging through snail-pace traffic - and I think Celia was too.
In the end, since we were heading towards Lichfield (where we were booked in for tonight and tomorrow in a hotel) anyway, we decided to have a day that didn’t consist of driving. Instead we went straight onto Lichfield, found a parking building, and wandered around the town.
The weather gradually improved, and we checked out the usual places: charity shops, secondhand bookshops, and so on, and visited the Samuel Johnson museum. Had a pub lunch, and headed on towards the Cathedral. (Which had its spire toppled by the Roundheads).
The Cathedral entrance is just extraordinary: dozens of statues of saints and kings, many of them lifesize, fitted into the face of the building. And there are dozens more inside. At first the place struck me as being overly militaristic in its trappings, with a lot of memorials dedicated to people who died in various wars, but it improved as we went on. And we discovered that Bishop Selwyn has his resting place there. He has a great deal to do with New Zealand, so that was a bonus. As was meeting a New Zealander at the door - he was welcoming people as they came in. Both Celia and I felt we knew him, once he started talking about himself a bit, but he didn’t seem to know us. I knew his mother, however: she’s the Anglican minister in Stewart Island.
(It’s been a strange thing that we haven’t met anyone we know from New Zealand since we’ve been here: usually NZeders are thick on the ground.)
The stained-glass window around the main altar is dazzling, full of wonderful colours. Much of it was rescued from a convent on the Continent, bought for £200 and sold to the cathedral for the same amount. The glass was then restored into its new location.
Finally we found our hotel where I’m blogging and Celia’s snoozing. She was tired.

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.