7 June 2012 (Thursday) - Off to Camp

For the last ten years the second weekend in June has been Teston kite festival. But not this year. A greedy council was only prepared to run the festival in June if they could be assured to make hundreds of pounds profit. Attendance at the festival had been declining for the last few years anyway, and the decision to only have one kite weekend at Teston this year could well be the end of the event. Which would be a shame. A bunch of kite flyers had arranged a protest fly-in for the coming weekend, but that struck me as somewhat daft. The council has said that they won't pay for the kite festival so we put it on for free as a protest..... how does that work?

But we've got used to going camping during the second weekend in June. And so with Teston not happening we've arranged to camp out in Smarden. I was planning to be up at silly o'clock this morning, and to be loading stuff into the car. But I wasn't. I kept putting off getting up, and thinking I'd have another five minutes in my pit. I eventually finished packing the car just as the Folkestonians arrived, and together with Martin we set off to the farm. And rather than cracking on with the work we drank coffee. Eventually we got the camping gear out of storage and got it all to the camp site.

Last year "Daddies Little Angel ^TM" had labelled all the poles of our communal tent so that she would be able to put the thing up this time. It's all very well going camping mob-handed, but when only two of us know how the tent goes together there can be problems for the others. So "Daddies Little Angel ^TM" tested her labelling, and it worked very well. And with the communal "Brown and Smelly" in place we put up our personal tents. Not that we believed weather forecasts, but the good weather was supposed to give way to rain at 1pm. And as luck would have it we got the last tent up at 12.45pm, and the rain started at 12.50pm.

Finding that most of the day's newspaper had been used to line the guinea pig's cage (they come camping with us, you know), we salvaged what was left of the newspaper and did the crosswords over a cheese and bacon roll and a bottle of beer. And with little else going on we all dozed off. Apart from a minor episode when the Rear Admiral ran over his brolly with the car, all five of us were asleep for most of the afternoon.

During a lull in the rain "er indoors ^TM" arrived, and tea was cooked. Beef Stroganoff. We don't muck about when we go camping. Camping is about having an enjoyable holiday, not roughing it in a tent (!) And with the washing up washed up we played Jenga and drank blackberry liqueurs and port until the early hours.