An Olympic Holiday Part 1 - Norfolk

At home, it was decided that after we were unsuccessful with all applications for Olympic tickets, the next best thing to do would be to escape the madness, and get out of London for a nice holiday camping together.  Julia and I took a decision to book 5 days each in a place of our choosing, and it was agreed to spend some time in the middle at her parents to catch up, and to get the washing done for the next week.

Julia got the first shout, and with that she picked a lovely campsite at Breck Farm, in between Holt and Sheringham in the north of Norfolk.  This was a lovely place, with the necessary facilities, hundreds of chickens roaming around, as well as a few sows and a randy boar.  We were allowed to light a fire in the evenings, and couldn't have picked a better place for our introduction into Norfolk life.

The first day was spent on the lovely grounds of Holkham.  It is a massive estate, fresh with woodland, meadows, a lake, and to remain typically English, a game of cricket.  Here, we decided to hire bikes for a couple of hours to explore, before heading off to Holkham Bay, which was a vast expanse of beach, that seemed to go on forever before you even reached the sea.

Holkham Hall <click to enlarge>

She makes it look easy

This was tiring work

Building Sandcastles on Holkham Bay

Knowing there was a dull day on the horizon, we decided to head to a brilliant place called Bewilderwood which is a children's adventure play area based around the novels of a local children's author Tom Blofeld.  Everything inside of it was child friendly for all ages, with tree houses, and high rope walkways, to mazes, zip wires of variable sizes, slides, swings, as well as interactive story times, boat rides, and general sing-a-longs.  Needless to say, Olive loved it.

Below is a video of a vertical slide that is approximately 30ft in height.  Julia wouldn't go near it, so I went up to let Olive take a look, as she wanted to go down.

In the end, there was nothing to worry about, the crazy kid was fearless at first sight:

 

Time was spent trying to catch Crabs in Wells-Next-The-Sea, and Sheringham.  To be frank, we were useless, but a couple of people took pity on our bucket to keep Olive happy.  We also headed onto Sheringham Beach, and noticed lots of people were writing words and their names in the sand with pebbles.  Regardless of some rain that was coming our way, we couldn't leave without leaving our mark.

Sheringham <click to enlarge>

We may have gotten a little childish in our old age

The rest was spent wandering around the countryside near to the campsite where there was a lot of woodland to get Olive excited to hunt for a Gruffalo.

It was a long trip over to Shropshire to stay at Nana's, but we thought we would try taking Olive for a proper walk up one of the local haunts I've mentioned in this blog, the Telford Wrekin.  We took some friends who have two young boys, and tried to make it as fun as possible for them all on the way up.  There were some defiant moments, and a bit of carrying on the shoulders (never helpful when going up a lump of a hill).  

On top of the Wrekin <click to enlarge>

There was fun had by all though as we got ourselves recharged for the next leg of our holiday.

I picked Pembrokeshire, in the south of Wales.