It always take a while to settle back into the swing of things, not least because there are 13 weeks of mail to go through, 13 weeks of jobs in the garden to catch up with, plus things like taking the car to be serviced, taking the campervan to be serviced and MOT'd, and so on and so on...
The net result is, I have not been keeping either the Campervan blog, or this one uptodate. Ten days have slipped by.
Have you noticed, if you use "I have not had time" as an excuse, and then someone asks you "so what have you been doing", you cannot answer?
I will have to skip whole days, since I cannot recall anything to report.
The weather has been poor, or to be more precise the weather forcaste has been poor. Day after day it has been forecast to rain, causing you to hesitate to plan anything outdoors, but the rain has not materialised. Until last night that is when we had a real downpour.
Friday last, Kathleen was back into the routine of looking after Daniel for the day. But a double booking with Emily's hospital appointment caused a problem. I came to the rescue and took him to the Marine Park for most of the day. He was rather timid at first, but by the end of the session he was comming down the banana slide headfirst, so no real problem there.
This used to be a favourite venue when my children were small, it has not changed much, even although some 30 years have passed. It has been refurbished in that time of course, but the council have done a good job and kept it very much as it was. If it is not broken, why fix it?
What was a big disappointment were the chips at Coleman's Fish and Chip shop in Ocean Road. These used to be magnificent as I recall, but on Friday they were the usual anaemic excuse for chips you get everywhere else these days. I blame all of this healthy vegetable oil and so on, bring back beef dripping, or whatever it was we used to fry chips in!
I do one of my regular routes, first to Whitburn, then along the coast to South Shields, past the ferry, to Tyne Dock, then back to Boldon via the old Sunderland / South Shields railway track, now a footpath/cycle track.
If you know it, you can see the coast changes very little, true Marsden Rock has crashed into the sea due to erosion, but otherwise, things are pretty much as they always were.
As I came through Colliery Wood (Boldon Colliery), on the way back, I actually saw a fox, I was too slow to get a picture I am afraid.
A few times during the ride, the sky darkened, and it looked as if I may get a soaking, but no, managed to do the whole 19 miles without getting wet.
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