You may have noticed that I went camping in North Devon recently. I really like Ilfracombe and my little mind was blown by the scale of the beaches – although I was less impressed by the number of washed-up jellyfish.
I had a free weekend and I’d have a weekend away in the UK. I like camping – it’s such a cheap and easy way of getting away for the weekend Did I say easy? Well, getting the tent up (without the mallet, you idiot!) and the self-inflating mat inflated isn’t as easy as dumping a bag on a hotel bed, and getting a tent dried and back into a bag designed to test the laws of time and space is even less easy. But what better way could there possibly be for a short semi-spontaneous weekend away?
We have a few people at work who are into caravanning. That’s not my thing. Caravans seem to me a lot of money to not go very far. One lady is buying a new caravan next month. I’ve looked at the pictures. It’s got two narrow single beds and two narrow sofas, it’s got a lot of dark brown wood, it’s got a tiny bathroom and she’s got a husband who’s very strict about what you can use it for, if you see what I mean. It’s got a hint of narrowboat about it. And how much is this thing costing? Twenty-three thousand pounds. Plus another fortune to store and another fortune to insure and another fortune for a car powerful enough to tow it. Boomers vs millennials, right there. I mean, I’ve spent the weekend feeling vaguely decadent about my two-man tent (with the porch, it’s easily twice the size of my old two-man dome tent, it’s six times the size of my travelling one-man and there was a woman on the next pitch also on her own in a tent that looked like a one-man, although I suspect it was actually two, making mine look somewhat palatial). You know how much my two-man tunnel tent with porch cost? Forty pounds. Imagine what I could do with $23K. I could buy an real house with that.
I found myself a nice farm on the hill behind Croyde, an actual working farm full of sheep and cows. Most of them were up on the hills surrounding the campsite, so you fell asleep to the sound of sheep bleating and then woke up to it again. Well, I say bleating. Have you ever heard sheep living in the fields? They yell. There were also two orphan sheep in a shed in the farmyard, well-fed, happy sheep who get plenty of attention from the farmers and also from the campers, who have to walk past them between the bottom camping field and the facilities building. They were a delight to stop and chat to every single time I walked across… but this is a working farm, as I’ve already said, and they didn’t painstakingly raise these orphan sheep for the pleasure of their company or even for their wool.
As for the facilities building, that was great too. It had large hot powerful showers, real toilets, a pair of butler’s sinks for washing-up plus all the brushes, cloths and liquids required, sockets for charging phones, a campers’ fridge and wifi! The old toilets & showers are next door, much more rustic in flavour but illuminated by a big string of fairy lights up in the roof and it was the prettiest toilet block I’ve ever been in!
One particularly nice touch was that the farm offered free wellies to borrow. It’s a bit of a drive back to the village via some very narrow twisty roads with blind corners and then tourist country parking costs. Or you could take a pleasant six minute walk down the farm track and there’s a pub right at the bottom. But it’s a really wet muddy lane. So you help yourself to a pair of wellies from the shed, splash your way down the lane and then leave the wellies in the hedge at the bottom and put your own shoes back on. Go into the pub, eat a plate of cheesy garlic bread followed by a huge chocolate brownie with ice cream and chocolate sauce, realise you’ve made a huge lactose mistake and hurry back, picking up the wellies as you splash back up the lane.
My one complaint was the other campers. When I’m camping on an actual farm, in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by yelling sheep and cows, I don’t want to listen to someone else’s aged pop music played on tinny speakers on the other side of the lane. Worse, the hills amplify the noise in the narrow valley and my tent was essentially pitched in the centre of a set of natural speakers so this racket seemed to be coming from all directions. I took to Twitter several times in my rage. I don’t want to listen to that, I want to listen to the magpie hiding in the big tree, I want to listen to the cows, I want to enjoy the silence of the countryside. Why on earth do you need to play rubbish music on your iPad while you’re eating your burned barbecued meat on the side of a hill anyway?
It rained the first night. My porch dripped a little bit and my sewn-in groundsheet let in quite a lot of moisture. The second and third nights I pulled my extra groundsheet up to cover it and it was windy both nights, which meant the tent flapped horribly but at least it dried it out thoroughly. I took my 2-season sleeping pod, which is wide enough to starfish in, and my 4-season good sleeping bag. With the two of them, I could adapt to any temperature I needed to, using one or the other, using one inside the other, using one as a blanket or a pillow. A couple of blankets for luck, or for building up the level of the pillows, and I was cosy. My tent was on a bit of a slope and my self-inflating mat has no grip at all on the bottom so any movement and I slid down the tent but otherwise my bedding set-up is now ready to face anything.
Yeah, it also rained on Sunday morning while I was packing up. I got the inner more or less dry and folded it up in the car but the outer was still drying when the heavens opened so in the end I had to stuff the whole lot into the back seat, where it remains right up until now. I’ll fold it all back into the bag at the weekend but at least I’m sure it must be dry by now. Putting the tent away is absolutely the worst part of camping.