Holidays...part 4

Saturday

Wow, wow, wow!!!!!  Today was the hottest day I have experienced in quite some time.  We roasted for the day – it didn’t relent until about 9pm a long and very hot day!

Long, long way to the sea

We were up quite early – the heat woke us up and by 8am it was too hot to be in the tent!  We had breakfast outside.  Pain Raisin for Matt and Tom and a cheese and ham croissant for me (all of us eating our favourite French things).  It didn’t take long to decide what to do today – it was hot, the sky was blue – it was a perfect day to go to the beach.  We packed up all the beach things and headed over (about 1 mile away).  We got a parking space without much trouble and carted all our bits over to the beach.  The tide was a very very long way out, in fact we could hardly see it on the horizon.  However, we decided to find ourselves a space on the high dry sand and got ourselves settled (that meant working out how to put our beach shelter up – it’s been a while, but we got there in the end without it flying off)  Tom and I then decided to head to the water, so we both creamed up and walked down to it.  It took a long while – about half an hour to get there.  When we got there, Tom was straight in.  I wasn’t (I was still wearing my dress) but it didn’t matter – the sea was so shallow and there was practically no waves at all meaning I could paddle as well with no problem.  Tom sat down, splashed around and generally had a good time until he realised Daddy wasn’t with us and wanted to go and get him.  

Tom in a sandhill

We returned to him – another 30 minute walk!  He was looking hot and bothered.  I thought I had packed everything, but of course I had forgotten about a book / activity for the adults to do whilst left on our own and he was bored.  Too hot to sleep, we were too far away to watch and apparently some families had been arguing near him.   I don’t think many people get it right on the first day of a holiday, so we put it down to experience.  Tom didn’t mind though – he got out the buckets and spades and made some sandcastles.  He then decided to take his Dad down to the water – which was getting nearer now.  I stretched out in our beach shelter and snoozed.  It was very very hot but I was tired and managed to drop off for a couple of minutes.

They boys came back damp and to save Tom getting covered in sand we decided to play piggy in the middle with the football to build up an appetite.  Lunch today was more ham and cheese croissants – all of which got devoured.  It took a while to convince Tom as suddenly he decided he didn’t like cheese!  You can imagine how well that went down – needless to say he finished it, even though it was under protest!

By now the sea was much much closer, so Matt and Tom went back down for a play, then we swapped over and then swapped over again.  I was in the sea up to my chest – but there were no waves to play in – meaning it wasn’t as much fun as normal and giving me less incentive to get fully immersed.   We did enjoy watching fish dancing amongst our toes and finding the warm bits of water and walking to the ‘islands’ of sand in the sea.  Tom had a whale of a time,  didn’t stop grinning from ear to ear the whole time he was in the water.

Old woman in old dress

By 2pm, however, we were all flagging.  We decided to call it a day and head into town.  Houlgate was celebrating its 110^th anniversary today and they had closed the main high street to traffic and put in games, stalls etc plus a lot of locals had dressed up in clothes from the ‘olden days’ and were parading around.  It was all very interesting, but first things first, we all needed a drink.  We stopped in the first café we found and had a drink each – Matt and I pretty much drank ours in one breath.  Tom took longer, suprising, as he was very red in the face and was flagging big time by the time we got there.  We all then decided to get an ice-cream each – to try to cool down even further.  This we did and it worked.  Our red faces returned to more or less normal.

We then returned back to the campsite and got out our swimsuits ready for a dip in the pool.  The pool was surprisingly empty (much emptier than yesterday)  The first pool we went in felt freezing cold – this mainly because we were all still hot from being on the beach all day, after a while we acclimatised and enjoyed feeling refreshed.  Tom, of course wanted to do the waterslides, so we were made to do them a number of times, but mainly we just enjoyed being cool again.

We had planned to go out for tea tonight, but once we realised it was festival day in Houlgate, we decided against it: it was too hot and the town would be packed.  We decided instead to go to the bar at the campsite.  Matt and I had a pizza each and Tom a hot dog.  None of us could finish our tea – it was just too too hot, and the food, especially the pizza was very filling.

We thought that as he had had a long, hot day, Tom should go to bed early(ish) so we put him to bed, but he wasn’t having it – every car noise, person walking by disturbed him.  I think it was about 2 hours before he finally succumbed to sleep.