Saturday 1 September 2012

Another woodland camping trip!

This week we had my brother Andy and his family come and visit, here he is with Rachel and Joshua...

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and here's Chloe, with a case for carrying captured bugs in for later study...
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Despite the mixed weather, we actually had quite a bit of sunshine, even enough to need sunglasses some days!
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A lot of time was spent sitting or playing in the woods, and eating food cooked up there:
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There was also time to practise some woodland skills:
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and do some metal detecting too, which turned up the remains of an old billhook:
DSC_4493 remains of an old billhook

Andy and I camped over a night with Josh and Chloe, while Tracy and Rachel went back to their warm beds.
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Of course, the kids were sensible and went to sleep soon after 7pm, while Andy and I stayed up late drinking beer round the camp fire. But we all had to get up at 6am... at least we saw a nice sunrise!
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We left the tent up, which was a good job as later in the week we went up for the day, and used it to shelter during a couple of brief rain showers... (Rachel's brother Andrew had joined us by this point too)
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The rain didn't last long, and then it was time for Josh and Chloe to cover their ears...
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while they watched me chainsaw some logs!
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Chloe was particularly excited by the whole thing:
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After cutting up the logs, we were surprised to find a toad had been hiding under them - good job the chainsaw cuts were quite far apart, or it could have been messy...
DSC_4518 Toad

DSC_4519 Toad

We didn't actually see any wild boar, but there's certainly some evidence of them around, such as over in my friend Alex's wood:
DSC_4523 Hole dug by wild boar

The rest of the week was taken up with visits to the beach and also the observatory at Herstmonceux, where I hope to go back in an evening to try out the big telescopes...

Mike

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