Beacon Hill Touring Park, our camp site outside Corfe Mullen.<\/p>\n
Our second week was as hectic as the first despite spending a whole week based just outside Corfe Mullen, Dorset, but was just as rewarding. The site we chose was rustic and spacious but had all the facilities we needed, the morning dew made the forests behind our pitch smell so fresh, it encouraged all sorts of mushrooms to grow and we caught glimpses of rabbits and hare running about. The site (Beacon Hill Touring Park) is certainly fantastic for children, plenty of space to run and cycle, climb up hills and trees and explore the woodland playgrounds and lakes. It\u2019s also a ten minute drive into Bournemouth and Poole and not far from the charming town of Wimborne Minster, see night time picture below.<\/p>\n
The woods behind our pitch.<\/p>\n
The selection of mushrooms that grew nearby.<\/p>\n
From here we travelled down to Teignmouth to meet our Spanish friend and his wife and had a wonderful day driving up through country lanes onto Exmoor, passing Hay Tor on the way. Lunch was in a wonderful olde worlde country hotel hidden away in a quaint village where you could have been back in the 1950s with the smell of open log fires and damp wood mixed with fresh clean air and summery honeysuckle flowers. We walked off lunch by crossing the estuary from Teignmouth to Shaldon and watched the fast flowing incoming tide battle with rowers, sailboats and the local ferry. A tasty Spanish casserole with even more wine rounded off a lovely day.<\/p>\n
Hay Tor on Exmoor heath<\/p>\n
The feeding of faces in Exmoor!!\\r\\n<\/p>\n
We then drove up to Taunton to catch up with my long-term friend, Lynnette and I first met when we were 6 year olds at school in Rhodesia and have remained in touch. Another lovely lunch helped the waistline expand even further!<\/p>\n
The weekend culminated in a brilliant BBQ with our respective brothers and their family. Arthur and Tess were joined by their youngest Leanne and her new husband Daniel and their friend Matthew, and Neil and Camilla brought along their latest addition, Millie the spaniel! We all ate and drank far too much but had a good laugh, several trips down memory lane, lots of hugs and a very late night\/early morning. Late afternoon was spent meeting up with my other brother Dean and his partner Shawna in Poole Quay, followed by a meal in an Argentinean steak house, probably our 4th or 5th steak during the last 10 days!!<\/p>\n
We moved the trailer from Corfe Mullen to Lee on Solent, Gosport for the two nights before our crossing so we were closer to the Portsmouth ferry port. We clocked up another few hundred miles by driving back up to Peterborough to meet up with Robin and Charlotte (who had just returned from a month working in Cape Town) before they fly off on holiday to the Dominican Republic and to spend time with Caity and of course, do a final shop for those essentials you cannot get abroad\u2026\u2026.English breakfast tea, TCP, Millicano coffee and most importantly M&S Percy Pig sweets.<\/p>\n
Our last morning on British soil turned out to be damp and foggy but the half hour journey to the ferry port was eventless and we arrived to find we were one of the first in the queue but one of the last to board! We were parked right in front of the closed landing gear so we hoped we are one of the first ones off.<\/p>\n
The evening part of the crossing was very choppy and we almost didn\u2019t make dinner\u2026..we persevered and the meal was really worth having; crab and langoustine lasagne, white bean soup with goats cheese topped cornbread, tomato tart topped with flowery salad, beef tournedos with pepper sauce and grapes all followed by the sweetest, lightest and tastiest souffl\u00e9 ever, served with a small Grand Marnier on the side. This certainly helped the stomach settle and encouraged a good night\u2019s sleep!!<\/p>\n
We are hoping that our short journey to our first stop at Zarautz in Northern Spain is uneventful and we can finally put our feet up for a while, relax and chill out!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beacon Hill Touring Park, our camp site outside Corfe Mullen. Our second week was as hectic as the first despite spending a whole week based just outside Corfe Mullen, Dorset, but was just as rewarding. The site we chose was rustic and spacious but had all the facilities we needed, the morning dew made the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-travel","category-uk","post-preview"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3034,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3033\/revisions\/3034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}