So we went into Halfords for an air freshener. Somehow we came out with a tent.
Yes, if you’re counting, this is my third tent. But what a lovely tent is is. Its wide, it’s long, it’s tall. Tall enough to stand up in without bashing your head on a lantern hanging from the roof support. And not just any lantern, either: a free lantern. To go with the free torch, the free sleeping bags – all four of them – and the two free double airbeds (I’ve always been a bit anti-airbeds when it comes to tents, but I have to admit that they felt very nice).
Oh, and the free compressor to blow them up, too.
It all packs into a nice big kit bag you can throw in the back of the car and was a bit of a bargain. Less than half price, all told. When you add up the cost of the air beds and the sleeping bags alone they come to £19 less than the tent. Add in the compressor, the torch, the lantern and the kit-bag and they’re paying you to take it off their hands.
Even at full price it would have been a good deal.
Cannot wait to get out and use it – likely towards the end of May when the weather is warm and the mozzie netting will come in handy.
Which of course means I have my old six-man tent to sell as you really don’t need two-, four- and six-man tents in your collection, do you.
Anyone want to buy it?
We were so lucky with the weather. After half a week of moving Rich’s belongings from Ipswich to Chelmsford, we took off with the tent and two camping virgins for the north Norfolk coast.
Our pitch, it turned out, was still a pig farm four years ago, but some judicious turfing, hedge-planting and building of shower blocks had erased any memory of the site’s previous use. Now it’s just a clearing in the woods rubbed bare in parts by muddy feet and waxy groundsheets.
We were trying out a new tent. Our two-man home-from-home is fine for short breaks, but we both wanted to be able to stand up inside (which it won’t let you do), so had upgraded to a six-man one that turned out to be so big you could easily park two large cars inside and still have room for a clutch of bikes on either side. It had three rooms and a cavernous living area in the middle that was so tall and wide it developed its own ecosystem. We woke up each morning to the sound of rain, not on the outside of our canvas, but falling from the inner surface of the dome. Still, it meant we had plenty of room for carrying in the table each night to eat and play cards in the light of our wind-up lanterns, so long as we sat there wrapped up in jumpers, coats and blankets and didn’t spend too much time envying the caravan owners lounging in their t-shirts.
It’s a long time since I last camped in north Norfolk, but very little seems to have changed. Sheringham is still campaigning against Tesco, and the steam train still runs from there to Holt. We caught it on Saturday afternoon and walked into the town. The coast was lost in a fog the whole way there and back, but in Holt itself the sun was bright and hot enough for us to sit outside at eat lunch. As we had done with breakfast each morning, and for fudgey snacks on the beach in the afternoon.
It was probably the last weekend of summer, symbolically capped by a burst of heavy rain as we finished folding the enormous tent back into the car yesterday afternoon.
I suspect it will also be our last (and first) weekend of camping this year. Perhaps in April we can dig out the enamelled mugs and bowls again. In the meantime, we finished off the trip by watching Carry on Camping last night, having forgotten how little of it is actually set on a camp site.
