Plan? What Plan?

Our route to the Western Isles of Scotland was partly dictated by a family event and stop-offs for essential repairs. The pins in the map included my parents' golden wedding anniversary in Dorset and various ports of call, eg back to Airstream in Cumbria, where our 684 could be handed over to the experts in the reinforcing and replacing of trailer bits. Unfortunately we had to endure an unpleasant Bank Holiday in the Cotswolds on the way. I'll gloss over that for now because I'm still bitter and I don't need to go there right now. The story includes rude campsite wardens, hundreds of unfriendly campers and under-performing batteries. Let's leave it there for today.

On a very positive note, when we went into Chipping Norton we were firstly cheered up by that most rare of occurrences, a free car park! Perhaps there is hope for the future of civilisation and the sharing of warm fuzzy feelings throughout the land. If that doesn't do it I know a place that will. I mean the heavenly Jaffe and Neale bookshop and cafe. This place fulfils two of my two essentials for life, books and decent coffee. Oh, and cake. And warm, friendly human beings, and a peaceful atmosphere. OK there are several things essential to a happy life and Jaffe and Neale knows all about them and wants to share them with you. Get yourself in there and indulge and emerge a happier bunny, like I did, twice. I also bought from there, among other things, How To Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson, which has been making me chuckle out loud and reinforcing my conviction that it is possible to have a life separate from employers and institutions.


We left the nasty site with the rude wardens and spent a few days at a farm near to Bibury. It's always a relief after that packed-in feeling on the bigger sites to find ourselves in a field again, with views of trees and sky and a more distant horizon. Bibury is a very attractive village, the sort that people visit to mill about for an hour or so and eat ice cream. We did. You know how you do? You look at the swans in the river and at the well preserved, captured-in-time prettiness and at something of historical interest (in this case, Arlington Row, medieval cottages, still inhabited), and everyone you pass looks straight through you as if you weren't there. They probably wish you weren't there, getting in the way of their photographs and taking up space on the footpaths.


Anyway, there are plenty of pretty villages and towns like that in the Cotswolds and some good walking too, apparently. We checked out some ancient sites while we were in the area. Belas Knap, for example, is an enormous chambered long barrow about 55 metres long actually. It sits on the top of a steep hill, above Humblebee Woods, three miles south of Winchcombe. It has been well excavated and partly reconstructed and there are four chambers evident now. Apparently 38 skeletons were found inside. We were there at about six in the evening and skylarks chattered, bees buzzed about, electric pylons could be seen for miles. The Cotswolds are strewn with them. It doesn't detract, they're just there, ancient and modern side by side.



Earlier that day we had seen Chedworth Roman Villa. We all know how much the Romans did for us; roads, personal hygiene, etc. At Chedworth it is very clear how important bathing was to them and how skilfully heating and plumbing was incorporated into a villa. Naturally they had under floor heating too. Not a modern invention after all but a recycled clever idea.


On a sunny Sunday we took a drive to Oxfordshire to see the Uffington White Horse and Wayland's Smithy long barrow. We have seen a few white horses carved into the sides of hills on our travels. Some are Victorian impostors but this is the genuine article, a late bronze age carving, so about three thousand years old. We didn't really find a good vantage point from where to admire the whole horse. It sits almost on the top of the hill. You can literally walk all over it, but of course then you can't see what it is that you're walking on. People were enjoying the sunshine, sitting around and within it's outlines, chatting. A man flew a kite nearby.
This is its head, upside down.


About a twenty five minute walk along The Ridgeway took us to Wayland's Smithy. This was a beautifully atmospheric wooded place which had been a burial site since around 3700 BC. It was peaceful, shady and sun-dappled, a background of birdsong, old trees patiently displaying years of hand carved initials.


But we had a plan and we needed to keep moving. One of our Airstreaming friends, Andrew had put word out that he would be touring around the Outer Hebrides in May/June and we liked the sound of that. With a bit of organising we should be able to meet up along the way. En route we could also do a bit of Wales and get our repairs and maintenance seen to in the North West. People often ask us how far ahead we plan our movements on our Airstreaming road trip. This is a typical plan. There's usually a direction (north-west) with some possible fixed points along the way (Airstream headquarters) and the rest we decide day by day, pretty much.

Life's A Beach

We are on the Isle of Lewis and we had driven along the B895 until it ran out and became what is known as The Bridge To Nowhere. One minute it's a road, then it's a bumpy track, then it's a bumpy track with grass growing on it and sheep grazing. We looked down on cliffs, tried to identify sea birds (there will be a test at some point), watched gulls and gannets diving into the deep turquoise sea. (I need to find some alternative words for turquoise because if am to write about the outer Hebrides it will get worn out). We wondered at the chunks of quartz embedded in the rocks and where does all the water come from to form a waterfall? I guess all this peat and moss is one giant sponge which gradually wrings out its moisture which then trickles to meet the other trickles until they gush and tumble over the rocks.


And that is when I thought, what a perfect way to occupy ourselves right now. Or any time really. We are free to wonder at the incredible beauty and dignity of this place. We are breathing the sweet-smelling air, walking on beaches and hillsides, dressing for rain AND sunshine and wowing childlike at the resulting rainbows.

These islands, I have discovered, are where rainbows are made. Often there is rain or mist with sunshine. You can see a whole rainbow from end to end, which is pretty amazing. You can be underneath a rainbow. You can see its ends disappearing into the grass. Until just a few years ago I had lived most of my life in London where rainbows just peeped above the rooftops, here I have been enveloped by them.

Then there is that turquoise sea. (I looked it up in the thesaurus, no joy, and blue-green simply doesn't cut it). I love being close to the coast anyway. On this trip we have followed a lot of coastline and, if we had needed to visit a more inland area we would soon get a yearning for the salty air and make a beeline back to the sea. What I usually find so invigorating is splashing, crashing waves, the air and the breezes and winds which blow into your face and mess up your hair. One campsite warden in Cornwall told me, "Every day is a bad hair day round here."


I like sand, pebbles, cliffs, seaweed, shells, lighthouses, deckchairs, piers, random detritus, joggers, dogs endlessly fetching a thrown ball.


Best of all, I like a deserted beach with crystal clear sea and talc-soft sand. Welcome to the Outer Hebrides. I've mentioned rainbows, well turquoise was created here too. The colour of the sea is psychedelic. It has this wonderful uplifting effect. Your eyes want to soak it up, your chest expands and your lungs want to breathe it in. No photograph can capture it, no words conjure it. It cannot be imagined.
I like it. I like it a lot.



T

The Parish Notices...

OK, so I lied about there being more soon, but it's not our fault. Honest!

We're in the Outer Hebrides where our mobile internet provider hasn't even bothered to give us a phone signal for most of the time, let alone a 3G connection for internet access. But now we've found a campsite where they possess that supernatural being of the airwaves - WiFi. So rest assured that there will be a whole lot of updates going on in the next few days.

in the meantime, there are a couple of things I'd like to draw your attention to, if you'll indulge me....



Firstly, following on from the great time we had back in March, I'm organising another Airstream get-together. It will be at the Bracelands Caravan Park and Campsite near Christchurch in Gloucestershire over the weekend of 11th - 13th September. If anyone would like more details, please use the Contact details here. If anyone is even remotely interested, please let me know ASAP so that I have an idea of numbers and can work out costs, though I expect it to be no more than £30 or £40 for the weekend. Please don't contact the site directly since they probably don't know about it yet - I'm dealing with central office.




Secondly, we've done a bit of a face-lift on our website. It's mostly a collection of our better photos, but there's a bit more info about the four of us too. Have a look and please, if you have any feedback, drop me a line.




Thirdly, again following on from the meet in March, we've created a forum for UK Airstream owners. The US Airstream Knowledge Sharing Forum, Airforums, is a brilliant resource for all things Airstream, but isn't really a good tool for UK owners to keep in touch. If you have an Airstream and you need any help/advice/sanity from other owners, please have a look and join us at the UK Airstream Forum.




Finally, I hope no-one is offended by the inclusion of GoogleAds on the page. I'm guessing that many of you haven't even registered that they're there. GoogleAds programme policy prevents me from encouraging you to explore those ads, so I am in no way asking you to click there, but if I can ever find out how to make something other than plumbers and B&B's in Norfolk appear, there may be something of interest to you.

We will be back with more about the journey soon. Honest.


Pete

Normal Service Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible...

It's been a long time...

Nearly two months since the last entry here. So what's been going on?

Stuff.

That just about covers it, I think. After a week or two, I reach the point where the prospect of having to recap on everything that has happened becomes too much to think about. So I put it off. So the gap gets bigger and there's more to write about. So I put it off. So the gap gets bigger... You see where this is getting me? On top of all that, I really don't like writing about bad stuff, and we've had a couple of little niggly problems with the trailer. They're all sorted (or in the process of being sorted) now, but at the time it's all just a bit of a downer. Not worth writing about, especially when I'm not in the mood to write.

Anyroadup, here's a quick re-cap, because there are actually a couple of people out there who have emailed me asking for an update! I'm chuffed to bits to find that there are other humans who actually read what I put here, rather than just look at the pictures, or who arrive by accident while they're googling Airstream stuff.

We were in Norfolk last time I posted (if you can possibly ignore the Airstream meet in March). Having been before, and finding it all a bit flat and dull, I wasn't expecting much. It turned out to be a real revelation! There are parts of Norfolk that are staggeringly beautiful. The sky goes on forever - we saw some fantastic sunsets there. The people were thoroughly nice, though they have a fairly relaxed and open relationship with the English Language. The accent is something like West Country, but with a bit less Pirate, and town names can be pronounced however you fancy - for instance Hunstanton becomes Hunston, Hautbois becomes Hobbis, Cley is pronounced Cly (rhymes with eye) and (my personal favourite) Happisburgh has somehow morphed into Hazeborough.

Norwich, home of Colemans Mustard and Deliah Smith was a real surprise too! We've visited many, many towns on our travels and almost every one of them never needs to be visited again. Norwich seems to have got things just about right. There are plenty of narrow, cobbled streets with small, independent retailers. There is a splendid covered market in the centre of town


while the larger "malls" are kept at a respectable distance from the centre, or simply out of sight - they have built a new shopping centre right next to the castle, but have skillfully hidden most of it underground! Norwich Castle is a cracker.


The outside has been restored several times, but it remains a magnificent sight. In typically English fashion, it was used as a prison for 700 years before the Victorians turned it into a museum. And an excellent on it is too!


If you arrive an hour before closing, you can "pop in for a pound." I know of no other museum where you can be walking through a contemporary art gallery, nip down a short flight of stairs and be face-to-face with a stuffed armadillo, turn a corner and be in the Twinnings Nantional Tea Pot Collection, go through a door and be alone in a room with an Egyptian mummy or take a side corridor and (while we were there) see an exhibition of Moore and Hepworth sculptures. Brilliant stuff.

Norwich Cathedral sits in the part of town imaginatively called "Tombland" and its spire, despite being the second tallest in the country, narrowly misses out on being the highest point in Norfolk.


Go to Norwich. Go on.

We spent a few nights on a lovely little site on the Broads. We sat by the river in the grounds of a boat-yard.


Across the water was a patch of boggy field which a pair of barn owls used as a hunting ground. A heron spent most of the day just standing around, waiting. We just sat around, watching.


We seem to have been, inadvertently, carrying out a Grand Tour of British Piers. Most of them have ranged from "a bit rubbish" (in a kiss-me-quick-hat kind of way) to simply "hulking wrecks". Southwold is a notable exception.

The pier is privately owned, and the owners have pumped a couple of million quid into making it presentable. And a very nice job they have done too. There is a busy restaurant (where plenty of locals go for a coffee - always a good sign), a couple of little gift shops selling some local stuff, and the excellent (though closed the day we were there) Under The Pier Show - a slightly bonkers collection of hand-made amusement machines. Southwold also has some very fetching beach huts, a lighthouse and, of course, a brewery. 'Nuff said.

A couple of miles from the little fishing/tourist town of Aldeburgh lies the completely bonkers village of Thorpeness. At first glance it looks like any other well-preserved Tudor village, but the entire lot was built in the early 20th century as a private fantasy village by one Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie, Scottish Barrister and obvious nutter. The village needed a water supply, but he didn't like the look of the water tower, so he had it disguised as a house, albeit an odd one.


The House In The Clouds (as it is now known) was converted to accommodation once mains water arrived, and can be hired as a holiday home. The water tower needed water pumping into it, so our man Ogilvie had a wind pump built, didn't like it, so bought the local corn mill and had it moved the two miles to its current site to do the job instead. Daft as a brush, but his legacy is still quite remarkable, in a peculiar kind of way. Ogilvie died in 1972 (on his own golf course at Thorpeness), and much of the village had to be sold off to pay Death Duties. I'm sure there's a moral in there somewhere.


Grimes Graves isn't the Dickensian cemetery that it sounds like. It is a neolithic quarry. Even by modern standards it is extraordinarily impressive. There are nearly a hundred acres of pock-marked land, looking like a grassy moonscape. (If you look carefully, you can see Tracey and a sheep, not talking to each other.)


Basically, a bunch of our neolithic predecessors (about 20) got together in the early Spring and dug a hole. A big hole. Some of the larger holes are about 40 feet deep and nearly as wide. 2000 tonnes of earth would be shifted in around five months, just to get at the best flint nuggets hidden down there. They would knock off in the Autumn, take the Winter off and come back the next Spring and dig another hole. They did this for over a thousand years (though probably not the same 20 guys - I'm sure that job satisfaction would be wearing a bit thin by then and most of them would have found a different job). One of the shafts has been excavated, and you can don a hard hat and descend a ladder into the gloom to have a look.



We spent a few days near Bury St. Edmonds, a town in transition. There are some lovely old bits rubbing shoulders with some really quite cool new developments. The problem seems to be that most of the larger retailers are leaving their premises in the "old town" and shifting their wares into the new bit. Add to this the spate of high-street closures and you get a town that doesn't quite work. Still, it has a brewery, so it isn't all bad. It also possesses the nations smallest pub. There is room for a small table, a window seat and about four people standing. Naturally, we had to try it.


As you might expect, there wasn't room to swing a cat, but to make up for it, there is a mummified one perching in the rafters. It was found when a section of false wall was removed. The shocking thing isn't that a cat was walled in alive (apparently a common thing in days of yore), but that somebody thought that walling off a bit of a room this size was a good idea!


This is a part of the ruins of the old abbey. It was near this spot, on the 20th of November, 1214, that a bunch of barons got together and decided to slap a restraining order on King John. And so, with the writing of the Magna Carta, was democracy born. Or something like that.

I spent a happy afternoon snapping away, and I hope you'll indulge me if I post a few of my favourites here...















If Sir John Betjeman had ever visited Lowestoft, he may have re-written his famous ode to Slough. "Come, friendly waves, and wash away Lowestoft" he might have begun, though it doesn't scan very well and he may have had trouble finding a rhyme. But the sentiment would be there. Lowestoft sits on the Eastern-most point on the British mainland, though I don't think it would be much of a disservice to the nation if the coast decided to move westward a little, leaving Lowestoft underwater.

Flippancy aside, the sea is a real and constant danger here. Sizewell nuclear power station dominates the horizon for much of the Suffolk coast. I'm not a fan of nuclear power - it strikes me as a bit dim to carry on producing waste that is so thoroughly toxic (and will remain so for another ten thousand years) when we have no idea what to do with the stuff we've already got. On the other hand, the Norfolk and Suffolk coastline is undergoing a constant and determined assault by the encroaching sea.


The Environment Agency is doing all it can where it can, often leaving the shore looking like something from the Normandy Landings, but if the sea level were to rise by anything more than a smidgen, it would be a losing battle. It wouldn't take much - a particularly bad storm combined with a particularly high tide when the wind is blowing from a particular direction. Thousands of acres of land would be lost. So there is a tangible feeling that the people of Suffolk look to Sizewell not just as the largest employer in the area, but also as a real and positive contribution to low-carbon electricity.


This is Dunwich. Or rather, it was. Dunwich was once one of the largest ports on the East coast. A few big storms and some tidal erosion, and the coastline in now a mile further inland from where it was. Dunwich was home to 3000 people, eight churches, three chapels and two hospitals. All gone. It didn't happen overnight, but you get the idea. The East Anglian Coast isn't the place to invest in property. Though, to look on the bright side, you may end up with some rather exclusive onshore fishing rights!

We had six weeks to explore Norfolk and Suffolk. Not nearly enough. If I were you, I'd go and have a look soon, before it disappears.

Last Chance To See...


There will be more very soon.......Stay tuned........


P

Airstream Heaven

"....We interrupt this broadcast from Norfolk to bring you the following...."

It was a sort of "I wonder what'll happen if I press this button?" moment.

Back in January, I posted a comment here and on the Airforums website asking if any other Airstream owners fancied a little get-together. I knew that there were better ways of getting in touch with more of the European Airstream owners, but I secretly wanted to find out how many UK owners use the US site and whether it was an efficient way of us UK owners keeping in touch. There was a small, but incredibly enthusiastic response.

The weekend was wonderful (if a little cold and damp at times). The Friday (when most of the group arrived) was a lovely day, but Saturday turned nasty, though that didn't stop us "enjoying" (and I use that word loosely - perhaps "enduring" might be a better choice) a barbeque in a hail storm and a biting North Westerly. We even managed to get the separate veggie barbie going with a little help from healthy slug of whisky and a blow-torch. Still, we gave it our best and stoically soldiered on regardless and it was a most excellent party, despite having to scrape ice off the table!


A total of nine outfits turned out for the weekend, ranging from new European models to a 50 year old vintage one. Here are a few pics of the weekenders (in no particular order)...

Five (of the ten) on site



Chris and his 684



Wide-bodied 684 and Bill. (It's the trailer that's wide-bodied, not Bill)



John & Carole with their 25' Classic



Ian and Ariane with their '78 Tradewind and some rather neat lego-brick levelling blocks



Gaynor, Carl, Connor, Jordie and Rory with their very excellent '59 Tradewind



I managed to miss getting a photo of Simon, Emma, their new baby Tilly and their 534, so here's one from the Airstream meet last year at the Game Fair. (They were still waiting for Tilly at that point)



Andrew (who spent most of the weekend working), his 532 and new Nissan Navara, about which he is very excited.



I was absolutely delighted to see a couple of Airstream motorhomes in the flesh. I've secretly hankered after one for ages, though I've never been up-close-and-personal before. They're HUGE!

Here's Chuck and Mary with their 310



Nick, Helen, Lily, Ella and Toby with their 250



A random Overlander that just happened to be sitting on a seasonal pitch on the site when we got there. Never saw who it belonged to, but it was great to be with it.




And, of course, Us and Ours.



We had a handful of day visitors too. Julia, Dave and Ella came up without their '66 Overlander since it was still in Winter storage, and Marc Harris of Silver Twinkie popped by to say hello. It was great to see them (even though they left their Airstreams at home!). The site staff (particularly Graham) were really helpful, and took everything in their stride.

So, would we do it again? Oh, yes. We've learned a lot from this little gathering, and we can definitely make the next one bigger and better. We found that "Airforums" is a great place for information and such, but I don't think it works well as a communication tool for UK owners. If there are any Airstream owners out there who live in the UK and would like to meet some others (I sound like a dating agency!), please get in touch via the About Us links at the top right of the page. It occurs to me that this might be the first ever time that ten Airstreams have been in the same field in the UK. I'd be delighted to be told differently.

Now then, where was I? Ah yes, Norfolk...