The final countdown – I find myself singing this as the days count down to our first European trip in Suzy. The time has flown. It hardly seems almost two months since we got here and our holiday seemed a long way off. It now feels just round the corner Saturday – 6 days to go and the weather has been awful with incessant rain and it feels much colder than April should normally feel. Apparently April has been the wettest on record for some years and I don’t doubt that at all. The garden looks forlorn and we have been trying to find a window of opportunity to get some netting up to stop the birds decimating our raspberries and other soft fruit. Last year was a poor year for soft fruit but it looks ... read more

Yet another rainy night. They seem never ending. The rain dripping onto the van roof does however have a cathartic effect. Welcoming, warm inside with the heating running and soothing. However, despite enjoying the pitter patter of the rainfall it does dampen enthusiasm for sightseeing. Everywhere looks so much cleaner, tidier and brighter in the sunshine. We seem though to be having none of that lately. After breakfast we set off for the Park and Ride on the outskirts of Stratford. It had recently opened and provided a clean and modern site with ample parking for cars and a specialised area for motorhomes. We had hoped it would be as good as the older sites of Chester and Shrewsbury and it seemed better. The Warwickshire blurb on line told us that the buses ran frequently to ... read more

For a couple of days we pondered - should we go or should we stay? What was putting us off - well one or two things. Firstly the weather which was changeable to say the least. March is supposed to come in like a lion and go out like like a lamb. However, the wind did not arrive, instead we had heavy torrential rain, sleet and even a covering of snow which blanketed the ground and made the country look as if it had fallen into the depths of Winter again. This was followed by glorious sunshine which out did the weather in the south of France. The second thing that put us off was the impending petrol tanker drivers strike which could have left us without petrol for our first trip in the van to ... read more

All the best laid plans of mice and men - this comes from some poem or other and it sums up the way our weekend turned out. We had planned to go north to Northumberland and visit Beamish with its old fashioned village where you can still use pre-decimal halfpennies, pennies, threepences and tanners to buy old fashioned fish and chips and sweets and travel on old tram:, to Alnwick castle and gardens; to Rothbury and Cragside the home of Armstrong and to Lindisfarne and its serene beauty. However things didnt quite work out right. I had thought I would be on strike from work and have an extra day holiday but this was cancelled last minute and it left us with only three days to play with. Northumberland would have to wait. We had been ... read more

Our third day in the motorhome started early - the birds were singing and yenut again the weather was cold and miserable. However hooked up we were reasonably snug in the van . Simon arrived at 8.15 and we left Suzy for the rest of her work to be done. We had got to the point where we had had enough and wanted to move on. We had the Citroen again and drove to Corfe Castle a pretty little town in the heart of Dorset. Again another place I had visited in the summer of 1976. The village is constructed almost completely from the local grey Purbeck limestone which gives it a grey appearance even in the sun. It comprises two main streets, East Street and West Street, linked at their north end at the Square. ... read more