Camp as a Row of Tents

Slightly prompter write-up this time.

First off, it's Bro and SiL's Wedding Anniversary today. Hard to believe that it was a whole year ago. Easier to believe that I haven't bought a card for them yet. Have texted them both though, so that's something at least.

So, Friday we drove up to Buxton, in Derbyshire. In order to avoid the obstacles that the Traffic Gremlins had attempted to line up in our way, we went cross-country instead of up the M1. Was strange travelling along tracts of the A38 that I hadn't seen since Alison was at University.

We managed to miss the sneaky short-cut turning (which wasn't described in the directions to the site, but which was pretty obvious on the map - less obvious on the ground) and so had to follow the site directions which drew the better part of a large circle around the site before actually heading for it.

The site itself was very picturesque. It was in an old quarry, so you were surrounded by jagged rocky cliffs that created wonderful patterns of light and shadow when the sun was shining on them.

After the tent was set up, I created the sport known as slugging. I won't describe it here for fear of being accused of cruelty to nasty slimey molluscs that keep making a beeline to your tent.

Did I mention Alison's parents were with us? I don't think I did. They were in their caravan, we were in our tent.

I don't think we did a lot on Friday evening. We all had a lot of photos to show off and so mostly that was what we did. Though, to be honest, by the time we'd all set up and had dinner there wasn't much of the evening left.

On Saturday morning, not surprisingly, Alison was up before me. I say not surprisingly because she's the sort who gets excited at waking up in a tent with the sun shining etc etc whereas I'm increasingly inclined towards something known as a 'lie-in'. I guess I must've got up about 9.30. Just as the tent starting getting uncomfortably warm inside. Heh.

I unwisely had toast and marmalade for breakfast. Why is that unwise? Because marmalade is mostly sugar. And sugar and I don't mix well. This is probably the other reason (apart from the heat) why I hit a nasty sugar low during the walk into Buxton. I was very ratty with people (mostly Alison) which just left me feeling guilty afterwards, once I'd got my blood sugar back up again.

Buxton's a strange little town. It's an old Spa Town, and it's a Market Town, and it's a regular, you know, town. The strange thing is these three different aspects of it seem to be very much separate. The Market bit is up the top of the hill, the Spa buildings and the other Victorian trappings (such as a rather magnificent pavilion, if you like that sort of thing) are down the bottom and the other municipal stuff and the high street shops are next to the Spa bit but not the slightest bit intermingled. I realise this zoning happens in most places but I've never seen it quite so obvious before.

We sat outside one of the Spa buildings to have lunch, which resulted in some rather vivid pictures (of the building, not the lunch), before heading back via the Pavilion (which up close looked a bit grim, especially the hothouse for the tropical plants - really gave the impression of them being grown in captivity, which is not something that's ever occurred to me before.

Instead of heading straight back to the sight we headed up onto Grin Low (a hill) to visit Solomon's Temple (a wee circular tower at the top). The views were pretty spectacular, and both Alison's Dad and myself took a mix of dramatic and silly photos.

Then we returned to the site, and I sat down and finished reading Resurrection Day, which I may have to post a full review of at some point, because it was good, and spooky, and a bit of a thriller. And Alternate History stuff is always fun :-)

After a bit of a doze, and Alison injuring herself on one of the pegs for the caravan's awning, and Alison's mum getting stung by an evil yellow and black insect that I won't sully this diary entry by naming, we went on an early evening walk, around the top of the quarry. Unfortunately, it was all fenced off well away from the edge, preventing us from taking any clever pictures of our pitch from above; but fortunately, I ignored this at one point and climbed over. Picked exactly the right point to do it, too.

The rest of the walk was fairly uneventful, apart from more clever/amusing/breathtaking/whatever photos, and a few comments from Alison ruing the fact that it hadn't been her birthday yet so she didn't have her own camera to take pictures with.

After a meal of (gas) barbequed fish kebabs and garlic mushrooms and corn on the cob, we played cards for the rest of the evening. The other three participants were rather merry on wine (I've never heard Alison's mum cuss before) and I was feeling fairly relaxed and merry as a result of the atmosphere.

Sunday mostly involved packing up the tent. This meant packing everything up in the car, so that when we decided to go to a Farmer's Market down the road we could unpack half of the stuff in the car to make room for Alison's parents (they hadn't seen my new car before).

The Farmer's Market was like any other, nothing remarkable to, erm, remark upon.

On getting home, I went through the usual ritual of trawling through missed LJ posts and all the spam email and the few things that I actually needed to read, LOL.

Goodness me.