Long Time Coming

I know it's been a long time coming, but this is what we got up to on the last day of our holiday to Norfolk.
We decided to take a drive up the coast road to a little seaside village called Mundesley. The beach here is pretty good, so the kids wasted no time in attempting to dig for Australia. Apart from the beach, there is not a lot to Mundesley, 2 gift shops, 1 cafe and a hotel. Nice and quiet, just the way we like it. Back at the caravan, the kids went to the Elle the Elephant club for the last time, whilst we started packing because instead of going home first thing in the morning, we decided to set off that evening so that we missed all the traffic. We got home at 1.30 am and went straight to bed.
It's been 3 weeks since the holiday and I've been back at work for two of them, but we have been on our travels since then and I've got lots of interesting places which wev'e visited in Yorkshire to tell you about. For now though I'll leave you a taster of what's to come.

We took a walk through Hardcastle Crags which is near Hebden Bridge.
On another sunny day it was a 7 mile walk taking in the Bronte Waterfalls, Haworth Moor and Top Withens on the Pennine Walk.
And just today we went for another walk (5 miles)taking in Ogden Water and Ovenden Moor, just a few miles north of Halifax.

I will go into more detail in future posts. See you later.

The Rose Garden

On the Thursday of our Norfolk holiday, we drove down to Attleborough to visit what my wife calls her "Mecca". The venue was Peter Beales Classic Rose Centre.
Peter Beale consistantly wins gold medals at Chelsea Flower Show and this year was no exception. My wife is a big rose fan and she was really excited about going there.
At the centre, all the roses that they sell in the garden centre are planted in gardens, which you can wander around and see what they look like. There are about five or six gardens, all different to each other. You can get plenty of inspiration, just wandering about. All the roses are labelled in the gardens, so all you have to do is make a note of the name and go and buy it. Unfortunately, my wife went and bought 4 of them and would have bought more until I said that she would have to leave all her luggage behind because there just wasn't room for roses and suitcases.

Mind you, plenty of room in my wallet after that excursion.

Yarmouth Row Houses

Me telling you what I got up to in Norfolk seems to be dragging on a bit but, hey ho, just call me slack, anyway here's another exciting, gripping installment...
Well, on the Wednesday we decided to go to Great Yarmouth, it being market day an' all. There's one thing we like, and that's walking around a market, and Yarmouth's is one of the better ones. There's a wide variety of stalls but Yarmouth market is famous for it's chip stalls. All they sell is chips and there's nothing better than eating chips smothered in salt 'n vinegar from a paper cone as you're walking round a market. I also made a bee-line for the jellied eel stall. Scrummy!
Another reason for going to Yarmouth was to do the walk that was featured on the BBC programme, Coast. The main intention being checking out a couple of museums.
The first one we went to was the Time and Tide museum. This place tells the story of Yarmouth to present day. It's housed in an old Herring curing factory and they've preserved the smoke houses where they used to hang the Herrings to smoke and cure. It hasn't been used for that reason for twenty years but you can still smell the smoked fish in the wooden beams. All the people who used to work in the herring business at the turn of the 19th century, used to live in what are called row houses. All the houses were built in rows with narrow ally-ways in between and instead of street names they were numbered , Row 1, Row 2 etc all the way up to the hundreds. Unfortunately a lot were damaged by German air-raids during the war and the rest were condemned as slums and pulled down. The massive Herring shoals that used to arrive off Yarmouth every year, dwindled until they are virtually non-existent now. You can still get the famous Yarmouth bloater though.
Well I've rambled on enough for tonight so I'll tell you more at a later date....

Petites

Continuing on from our holiday in Norfolk, on Tuesday we went to Petites Animal Adventure Park. We've been before on previous holidays and always loved the place.
Petites is a mixture of childrens fairground rides and an animal park. There is a petting area where you can get up close to animals and feed them. We'd just been in the enclosure and the kids were washing their hands when I managed to snap Rudolph going for a walk. Animal enclosures are dotted around the park, but there aren't any big animals, just the nice small ones that kids like.
There are lots of kiddies fairground rides to go on, some of which adults have to accompany their children. This roller-coaster didn't look very big but it was a bit fast even for me. Of course the little girl loved it so much, she made me go on it again. I was glad that you only pay one price at the gate and then everything is free because the amount of rides the kids went on would have dented the wallet a bit.
There is also an open air theatre where a magic show or a clown performs every hour.We watched Billy Bubbles magic show featuring Maxi Mouse.
Also in the park is one of the biggest adventure playgrounds I have ever seen and believe me, when your a Dad, you've seen a lot. This one was a maze of slides, climbing frames, tunnels, there was even a kiddie size death slide. In the monkey house I took a snap of this cheeky chappy. I've been in monkey houses before, where the rascals show their bum and pee on you, but this one behaved itself. There was a fishpond with loads of coi carp in which you could feed. When you threw a handful of food in they didn't half churn the water up.
After the park we took a drive down to Reedham and had a look at the pleasure boats going up and down the River Yare whilst we licked on an ice-cream.
....some more to come another day.

A Trip on the River Bure

On the Sunday of our holiday in Norfolk, we did the shopping. When you are self-catering, the provisions for the week need to be sorted out. Fortunately, there was a Tesco's a couple of miles down the road from the camp, so we spent the morning there. The weather wasn't brilliant after the storm the night before, so in the afternoon we went and shivered on the beach. The wife and myself shivered, that is, the kids got stuck in building sandcastles and didn't seem affected by the cool seabreeze.
On the Monday, we took a drive up to Wroxham. This place is one of the biggest centres for boating on the Broads. Norfolk is famous for it's Broads. (Not an American lady of dubious quality.)The Broads started life as old peat diggings which ran parallel to the rivers of Norfolk. Over time they were flooded, and now provide miles of navigable waterways for trading and pleasure craft.
We decided to take a pleasure cruise up the River Bure and I took this photo of a Heron contemplating were it's dinner was going to come from. At a sedate 3 mph the trip was going to last 1 1/2 hours calling at a couple of Broads on the way.
When we got to Salhouse Broad(I think it was called Salhouse.) there were row upon row of sailing dinghies. This Broad is home to the Norfolk Sailing club and the guy giving the commentary said that on race days he can't get the boat in because of all the yachts flying around the place. Further around the Broad is a Norfolk Wherry, moored all by itself. Wherry's used to be the main cargo shifting vessels of Norfolk before the combustion engine was invented. This one was built in the latter half of the 1800's. There are only 3 wherry's left today and this is one of them, which is privately owned.
Back at the camp I dropped the kids off at the Elle the Elephant club whilst the wife and I had a couple of hours peace.
....to be continued.

Freddy's back in town

Well that's the holiday over for another year. We've just spent a week in sunny/rainy Norfolk staying in a caravan and although the weather hasn't been the best we all enjoyed ourselves.
This is a picture of the caravan which was our "home" for the week. Although I wouldn't want to live in one all the time, it was comfortable enough for the week. The kids loved it and thought it was a great adventure. All the bedlinen and cooking utensils are provided, so all you have got to do is buy the food and cook it. Mind you, it's a bit of a trial cooking on a Calor gas stove, but we managed.
We set off at 10.30 am last Saturday and rolled into the "Holiday Village" at 6.30pm. It normally only takes about 4 hrs to get there, but the wife wanted to stop off at the lavender fields at Norfolk Lavender on the way down. She took her time looking around as well, but the kids found the adventure playground, so at least that stopped them moaning. We also took the longer, but more scenic route down the coast road, which is 20mph in places.
After unpacking, we had a quick look around and then settled down for the night. No sooner were we in bed when there was an almighty thunderclap and the heavens opened up and of course it sounded very loud on the tin roof.
Great I thought.

...continues to-morrow.