Monday
We’re in Devon on holiday! It’s just me, Tilly, Mummy and Andy came too! We’re staying in Croyde in a ‘Ruda’ caravan park. There’s a beach (that Mummy thinks is owned by Ruda) in the caravan park, just minutes away from our really very conveniently positioned caravan! And the caravan itself is brilliant as well. The beds aren’t very comfortable, but they gave us three bedrooms instead of two (Tilly and I share the usually one bedroom with two single beds, Mummy and Andy have the one with the double bed) but since we’ve got another bedroom we’ve bundled the duvets from that room onto our mattress. We’re going to lie on them and use the original ones to lie underneath. Hurgh, what a lot of talking!
Today, we brought a pack of 25 lovehearts to keep us going (!) for the car journey. We figured out that if it took about five hours, we would need a loveheart per twelve minutes – but then we realised that our calculations were wrong, we would nead a loveheart per twenty-four minutes… twelve had been for one person!
Anyway, I trust you’re not as interested in calculating lovehearts as we are, so I’ll proceed. We drove for maybe three hours and then stopped at a stately home place called Tyntesfield. It was really good! We walked round the gardens and then Mummy bought us a delicious cheese scone in the cafe. At the end of the walk round we went inside the house. The house was Victorian Gothic, owned by Anthony Gibbs, or Gebbs, I can’t remember which, son of rich Matilda Gibbs/Gebbs. What disappointed me a little – with my love of clocks – was that no one seemed to want to know the time, and therefore there were only six clocks, all but one of which were carriage and tiny mantel ones. I really think Anthony and Matilda and whoever his father was ought really to have been ashamed! Pah!
The house, apart from lack of clocks, was very nice, and we didn’t want to leave when we had to! We went back into the car, carried on our calculations for when to eat the next sweet (mind you, we’ve got another 25-sweet packet for the way home), and finally, FINALLY, we drove into our caravan park!
For the end of the day, we had a pizza – which – random fact – I used to think was spelt ‘peetsa’ – then walked round quickly with a fruit pastille lolly each! It was a nice way to spend the evening and not only that but it tired us all out, so that when Tilly and I went to bed we dropped off less than a moment later!
Tuesday
In the morning, we woke up and played with our diablo toys. We played with them for quite a while and then Tilly and I went to the swimming pool. It’s a really cool one! The pool was a shallow deep one with rocks and fake palm trees and there were rapids, though they were quite slow. But the best bit was the water slide! It was a long winding one and you had to go on these spongey phome mats (which were a tad mouldy, but shhh) and then you slid down and splashed at the bottom! It was so much fun! We went in at ten past ten, and came out at twelve!
After swimming, it continued to rain so we had a caravan day. Andy installed one of our favourite games, Boggle, on the television, and I won! I got eighteen points in one round because Andy gave me triple points for biscuit-related words. I got away with ‘thin’ and ‘thins’ because of the ‘Thins’ biscuits we had earlier. And because I won, I got two ginger biscuits, and a big, bulky, raisin-y, sultana-y, cinammon-y cookie-biscuit! Tilly got one ginger biscuit and two butterscotch Border ones. Now why I am talking about biscuits? Beats me.
Wednesday
Today we went to Croyde Bay, the one with the name that sounds all nice and reminds you of salt. Anyway, we got into our swimming costumes, put our dresses on top, and went off to the sea. We splashed about, made spas in the rockpools, and had lots of fun. At one time I saw this shiny, see-through stone, and I crouched down and picked it up, and it wasn’t a stone – it wasn’t even solid – it was like jelly! And then it dawned on me: I’d touched a dead jelly fish! It was a bit scary and kind of cool at the same time.
Then we walked up Baggy Point – well, we went up the big hill but it was lunchtime when we got to the actual Baggy Point part, so we went back. It was hilly and green and covered in flowers and poo. Sheep poo, not human poo. Now I’m going to have chicken rolls with Andy.
For the other half of the day, we walked and walked and walked. Basically, we went back to Croyde Beach, and climbed around the outside of Baggy Point. It took an hour and a quarter! We were exhausted. The whole path was perched on the end of the cliff, and it was so steep: you could quite literally jump and fall off, and you wouldn’t have to fall down, just clean off the edge.
When we got to Woolacombe beach (at last) we decided to write a message in the sand – an enormous one – because somebody had drawn a huge ‘O’ and you could see it from the cliff path. So, inspired by what Max Romeo told us at the Africa Oye Music Festival in Liverpool that we went to, we wrote ‘ONE LOVE’ across the sand! We made it enormous, but then someone came and smooshed it a bit so it said ‘OHE LOVF’ when we looked down at it from the cliff. If Max Romeo’s on Twitter, Andy’s going to send the photo we took to him!
Thursday
Today we went to two towns, Lynton and Lynmouth.
We walked round the shops for a bit and then went to the ‘Valley of the Rocks’ – territory of the feral goats! We read on the National Trust website that there used to be sheep on the cliff, and that all the feral goats came and butted them off the cliff! However, they reintroduced seventy-five of the goats because they were eating the grass off the cliff and keeping it under control so it didn’t get too overgrown. We were terrified some feral goat was going to come and butt us off the cliff! I’d never been so scared in my life! I spotted one and Andy spotted one, but both were really far away on the top of the rocks and we didn’t really see them very much. I saw four soft-edged prongs sticking up out of the rock at the very top of the mountain, so it looked a little like a four-fingered hand. At first I thought it was just more rock, but then it turned out the two lower ones were ears, the top ones enormous curled horns! And we knew for sure after that because it twitched its ear and turned and ran off!
We did some more shop-walking, and then we climbed over these huge hills down from Lynton to Lynmouth and we were exhausted! We knew we couldn’t get back up them again before the parking ticket expired! 😉 So we got the funicular railway ride back up, and it was really cool! There was a picture on the wall when Mummy said, “Oh look girls, there’s a picture of the Victorians in it. Remember, that’s when it was made?” And then Tilly looked closer and said, “No Mummy, that picture may be black and white, but it was taken in 2000.”
We also went to a place called ‘Watersmeet’ and Andy and I played Boggle on his phone while Tilly and Mummy watched a boring waterfall which even Mummy said was ‘not the highlight of the day’, but apart from that everything was fun fun fun! Now we’re about to go and get fish and chips for dinner!
Friday
Today, day four, was the last day of our holiday. We packed up and got in the car for a long journey home. Again, we spread out our Loveheart Eating Times in my note pad and we shared out the 25 sweets equally by eating one every twenty-four mins. We stopped about an hour through our journey to go to an enormous stately home and gardens called Knightshayes. It was lovely! We strolled round the gardens and inside the house I counted all the clocks there! I can’t remember exactly but I think there were about fifteen! We had a delicious lunch in the grounds, but we were meant to buy stuff from their cafe, not eat our own, so Andy and I hid behind a bench while he cut up the Sicillian lemon cheesecake!!
There were plenty of queues on the way home – three, actually, but they were crazy long! We left at twenty to three and got home at half seven! Jim and Jean nextdoor had a parcel for us, so we went round to collect it, and also gave their new dog Brexit (!) a stroke and some doggy biscuits.