Lovely holiday let near Blakeny and Holt. Super weather: mostly dry and sunny. Days on the beach (Cley, Wells), walking locally, steam trip to Sheringham. Blooming lovely.
Didn’t have to do much more than walk out of the mammoth house to be in the middle of lovely countryside. Woods, fields, sea, the spires of nearby churches — that was pretty much all you could see. Nearest neighbour was about a mile away down at Glandford and happened to be a lovely little arty cafe and gallery.
We got there on Friday evening without the car blowing up, which was nice. (We’d had a random overheating event a few weeks before which, of course, blew the head gasket.) Mum and Dad had got there a few hours before and were finishing unpacking. The place was amazing — amazing vaulted living area and [insert more hyperbole here].
The next day, Saturday, we wandered down to the nearby village of Glandford and had coffee and pastries and a look around the art galleries there. Very pretty hamlet with some lovely flint-built dwellings including the farmyard that also housed the Art Cafe and galleries (some of the art was pretty good), as well as a small terrace, large house or two, and a pretty church with a, erm, what’s one of those clockwork bell-ringing things. Clarion?
Lola really loves walking Sunshine!
We went to Cley-next-the-sea on Sunday. Mostly pebble beach; salt marsh to one side; freshwater to the other. Lunch from the van; much paddling from the girls, and nearly swimming from Grace. On from there to Blakeney for a quick gander and an ice-cream.
Think we stayed local on Monday. I put together a scavenger hunt for the girls to make the prospect of a walk more inviting. It worked really well, with everything on the list being eventually ticked off. Even a bone. At some point, we (Isa, Dad and I) drove to Holt to pick up a couple of things (toothbrushes!) from Budgeons. We took a brief wander to the town centre (partly in search of Aperol) and then, on the way back, dropped in to Holt station to check out the times of trains to Sheringham
On Tuesday, we took the train to Sheringham from Holt. Yes, of course, it was a steam train. Good fun. Bought sarnies at Tesco and took them to a little shingle working fishing cove. The girls had a lot of fun clambering over the rocks which were covered in children despite a “Danger: keep off the rocks” sign. Having decided there was no more danger there than is represented by clambering around on any jumbled but stable collection of hard, uneven surfaces, and recalling the amount of fun we had as children clambering on rocks, we decided to ignore the sign.
Erika, Chris, Rosie and Tom Rigg all come over for a coffee and a game or two of badminton on Wednesday. They were staying in Cromer — though up to a day or two previously, had been camping only a mile from where we were.
The following day — a real scorcher — we went to the beach at Wells-next-the-sea. Sun, sea, sand, seals — the whole caboodle. The kids had a fabulous time in the water and spent most of the time (about four hours) there. It’s a lovely beach — the same one we went to with Manisha all those years ago — with great swathes of golden sand, clear water, multi-coloured beach huts, a piney spit of land across the channel down which boats chug and seals idle…
Saturday, pasticcio. The kids helped Nonna make the pasta. Bruna came round to help put it all together.