Sunday, July 17, 2005

Anyone for a punt?


DSCN1560
Originally uploaded by Leighbob.
Lovely day in Cambridge yesterday that had unexpected consequences!

We met up with Chris and Emma in Cambridge as they were on a weekend away in their new caravan. Not really my cup of tea, but sitting outside in the lovely campsite in the sun and Kath and I have sorted out our September holiday!

We've joined the Caravanning and camping Club, and we're off to buy a tent! We've been threatening going camping for years now but never got a round to it...now we have some spare cash and a week off so it'll be cheaper to go camping! Just got to get all the kit for it now....and go on practice stay at a local campsite.

Lovely!

2 comments:

Niles said...

Yay. We'll have to have a group camp at some point.

We can recommend Shell Island (http://www.shellisland.co.uk/) a gorgeous location, see all my photos on flickr. Lets you have bonfires, which I really enjoy. Unfortch now you need a fire-bucket, where before you could just burn stuff on the floor.

It gets a bit crowded in the school holidays, thobut. And you need a serious tent to camp there if it's windy. We've wrecked several. But there are so many cheap tents about now, that perhaps it's best to think of them as disposable?

The absolute best, but pricey, large tents are, I think, the Khyams. http://www.khyam.co.uk/tents.asp

If you need to borrow some camp kit whilst you get used to it, let us know.

A few of our tips and tricks: sleeping is better with two duvets rather than sleeping bags. One under you, one on top. If camping in the cold, use extra layers under you for insulation from the ground rather than on top. I mostly use an airbed (cig lighter inflator is godsend!) but in cold weather, beware of convection currents within the mattress leaching the heat away.

Don't buy a Thermarest unless lightweight camping is important to you. Waste of money for car-camping.

Have to say, I've been camping all my life and never seen the need for joining the C&CC...

Leigh said...

Yeah but for £30 it takes the hassle out of finding a nice site to camp at and they send you a load of directories etc.

Espesh when we have so little experience...