As is usual when camping, the children woke up far too early, though tbh it wasn’t nearly as early as it could have been given the late night. The plan was to make a quick get away from the campsite so as to be as early as possible and avoid queueing into FoH, which I nearly achieved, except that I got sidetracked into an optimistic visit to Tesco to pick up a camping stool. They didn’t have any, but I did need to stop for a new sunhat for Small – don’t know how he’d managed to leave home without one, but he did. And we got some mini chocolate muffins, as the night before I’d managed to pick up blueberry, which are apparently inedible. 😉
And then we queued. Took about an hour to get in, which was rather depressing, but at least we had chocolate muffins to keep our spirits up 🙂 Given we were so much later than I’d planned, I thought we might as well head for the family area in preparation for the lunch time meetup, and the kids were thrilled to see a seaside. After all, we so rarely see the beach these days :rolls:
Very pleased to bump into Kay and X there, and soon joined by Nic, Helen and Jo, so while the kids watched Punch and Judy or dug holes, we had lunch. After that there was What-ho Henry, by BZents. Then we picked up time travellers passports and went to try a children’s activity or two.
We arrived at the closed end of the queue for the world war II obstacle course, which was slightly disappointing, but the queue for the tilting was much shorter so we joined that instead. Nearly disastrous as with only three ppl ahead of us, Small suddenly decided he needed the loo, but he managed to hang on and have his turn, where he did really well. Big decided she didn’t want to try that one out, so we dashed for the loos instead.
From there we went into the activity tent, which was sweltering, but still attractive apparently – both of them made a kaleidoscope, then Small made a cup and ball, and Big a wooden doll.
By this time I was flagging – it was kind of hot and muggy. We bought freshly squeezed fruit juice and started to meander our way to the gate – I was feeling rather hard done by that basically we’d seen and done nothing that we couldn’t have done elsewhere for much lower cost – but as we passed the main arena it became apparent that the jousting was about to start, so we worked our way round to find a decent gap and sat down to watch.
It was very different to the jousting we saw last year. This was Tudor style and the knights didn’t seem to have a great deal of control over their mounts unlike last year where the knights were quite agile really. It was quite a spectacle and the children did enjoy it, right up to the point where one of the knights crashed to the floor 🙁 I think he was OK, but it was quite a heavy fall, and as it had been the last run anyway they stopped at that point.
Headed for the exit and bumped into the Beans, and made an arrangement for SB to join us in the free playground back at Wicksteed, which worked beautifully – we’d just parked up near that end when we got the text saying they were coming in.
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