I've been going through my couple-of-hundred photos from last summer's Great Welsh Walk, and filling out the Flickr album a bit. It's a restless business, looking at adventure-ish summer photos. It's getting me thinking of what to do and where to go this year. Summers are too good to waste them not going on expeditions of some sort.
Also reminded me of the infinite variety that there is in campsites. The signs here were on a site at Rhaiadr Gwy, or Rhayader if you prefer. It was nicely-located on the bank of the youthful River Wye, and the showers ran on time, but...
....this is more my sort of place, on a farm high up near Cemaes Head. There were things growing in the shower (singular), and everything was higgledy-piggledy, including, or especially, the landscape....and it was Very Nice Too. A rainbow hung over the Teifi estuary as we pitched the tent and the sun reappeared after the rain which had followed us from Hay. We watched a chough haranguing a buzzard high above us, and a whitethroat sang from the adjacent ash tree.
Well, I think it was a whitethroat.
We met this german couple further south. They thought it was hilarious that there was such a complete lack of consistency in british campsites. Look, they're laughing. We were sharing our memories of that shower with things growing in it.
They like that sort of thing. They said they preferred it to the uniformity of european municipal campsites.
Perhaps they're not typical germans.....
...this, on the other hand, is the encampment of a fairly typical Modern Family That Camps. I'm curious; if there is a recognisable demographic thing going on here, then where did this particular group come from? -were they the sort who would have been going on package holidays to Spain twenty years ago? Are they a new growth rather than an evolution? Questions, questions. I suppose I could always pluck up courage and ask them. Lord knows there's no shortage of 'em......o well, there's always hit-and-run camping. Melt away with the morning dew, leaving no trace of our passing.
Roll on, summer.
A distant jet plane,
And a blackbird chipping chinks
From the dawn's silence
He's no fool is he that Richard ... making himself a nifty little bench to sit on, you on the other hand don't seem to much mind a wet bottom.
ReplyDelete*shhhhh* I made the bench, then he sat on it....
ReplyDelete...my bum remained dry thanks to the coat I was sitting on. It's very easy to get wet in the Great Outdoors, but bloomin' hard to get dry again.
This is a message from one Modern Family That Camps. We've always camped. At first, in a tent that was probably stolen, with nothing but an elderly sleeping bag between us and the cold ground. No airbed, no bloomin' groundsheet even. We now realise we've perhaps gone a bit far the other way, what wiv the kitchen sink an' all. I've recently been looking at small tents with a view to some swift guerrilla camping before our knees finally give out and we have to find a granny-tent. I saw a fine one of those in 2006 with a Dutch granny in. Tall tent, camp bed, table, chair and crossword .. and the grandchildren camped on the other side of the river. Nice, I thought.
ReplyDeleteThere's definitely a new breed of camper though, among the pork-fed people. I met one chap with brand new top of the range camping gear (though shalt not covet thy neighbour's tent) who had gone out and spent £2500 when his kids (5 & 7 ish) begged him to take them camping and canoing and noooot to St Lucia again . £2500 represented what he would have spent every year taking them on exotic holidays.
Any more questions, please *do* ask.
My lightweight tent is a Phoenix Phreak, and it's tiny and nice, and, like all ridge tents, apparently no longer available unless you get lucky on e-bay.
ReplyDeleteI would ask how on earth you can manage to spend £2500 on camping gear, but I was looking at the Tentipi range a while back because I quite fancy the retro/hippie thing (we used to have a couple of old bell tents on our earliest expeditions)....cor, you could have knocked me down with a fevver.
I like "pork-fed people". *jots it down in book of useful phrases*