Easter: Camping, Piglet’s Birthday and sunshine – Part 2
I last left you in a forest campsite, weakly lighting a log fire and rejuvenated under a bucket shower. The smell of fresh wood smoke bristling in the nostrils, the early sun breaking through the gaps in the trees. Piglet stirs slightly in his sleeping bag and wakes with a giggle. “Daddy Grizzle!”, he yelps as he wiggles out and comes over to give me a morning cuddle. Someone has woken brightly from 10.5 hours sleep…
Today is our only full day on the campsite. An exercise in relaxation. And, coincidentally, the balmiest, most stunning sunny day of 2019 so far. We chuck on some clothes and stagger out into the sunshine to make some porridge. Oats, cashew nut milk (going through the cartons at such a pace that it doesn’t really matter that they’re not cold anymore), a sliced up banana and a healthy dose of chocolate spread.
After breakfast, its washing up, a round of bucket showers and back to get dressed into fresh clothes for the day. We head out for a walk on the huge working woodland on the grounds of the campsite. We basically just followed the forest road for a mile or so through the winding woodland. Piglet on his balance bike, carefully deciding whether some inclines are too steep to cycle up/down (with quite a degree of caution, I must add…). We looked for places to stop for a (well planned) snack and drink but every single fallen log or bare patch of ground was crawling with ants. I’ve never seen so many ants in one place. You could almost imagine them deciding to get together a carry away a full fallen tree if they put their collective minds to it.
Eventually we found a patch of ground that seemed relatively clear and worked our way through a packet of oat cakes and a couple of cereal/fruit bars, Piglet delighted to be self sufficient with his backpack of snacks and drinks. Eventually the ants seemed to sense that we had/were food and started investigating so we made haste back to the tent.
The guise of the walk (and the day in general) was to hunt for a dragon called ‘Zog’. Zog is a very cute character from two of Julia Donaldson’s series of illustrated children’s books (see also The Gruffalo, Stickman, and my personal favourite The Highway Rat). Piglet seems to love the books and in particular, having seen the TV adaptation last Christmas, Zog. So much so that we loosely planned his birthday around it. As such, much of this holiday was prep and build up in anticipation ahead of turning the big 03. It was quite easy to suggest that impromptu structures like stick shelters or fallen trees were Zog’s home. Piglet either played along willingly or believed us whole-heartedly – it’s hard to know at that age. He definitely embraced a sense of excitement about the whole thing; although I think I took it too far when I started making flapping wing sound effects behind him at one point and he got scared. Sorry, Piglet.
Once back at the tent, lunch consisted of anchovy pasta. Made all the more tasty from the fresh air of the walk and being cooked (at least partially) over an open fire. Shortly after lunch Piglet and mummy were clearly exhausted so we put the roll-out mats and blankets in the clearing of our camping plot and used camping chairs to cast shade for a siesta. I used the down time to read (the first new book in about a year – Hear the Wind Sing by one of my favourite authors: Haruki Murakami. I so used to love reading!). However such was my lack of practice of really getting into a book, I went for a wander around the rest of the campsite after a couple of chapters.
My wander led to us finding another route into the forest and so once everyone was awake, we wandered out for a second expedition. This path wiggled us up round several valleys for possibly one of the most beautiful walks I’ve ever been on. Because the forest is only really accessible from the campsite, and there’s some 600 acres of woodland to explore, we hardly passed a soul. Also the hot afternoon summer cutting through the cool April air and with managed forest for miles in every direction; each ridge or corner brought another, greater view. I can only imagine what it must be like in autumn as the colours change and the leaves start to fall. For those that have seen it (and remember it), I can only imagine the ‘exchange’ scene from the film A Life Less Ordinary in which Ewan McGregor’s character attempts to exchange Cameron Diaz for her ransom with two of Angel Gabriels’ angels, played by Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo under the most amazing autumnal landscape. You really should see it if you haven’t. Mind you, you should see it again if you have. Basically watch that film!
I was disappointed when I’d realised we’d got to the point on the path to turn around. Piglet was starting to get tired and with both him and his balance bike; carrying both all the way home was going to be a handsome task. It takes a certain combination of parental generosity, indignant pride and stupidity to carry your son on your shoulders up a hill until you’re in too much pain to actually lift him down.
Dinner consisted of ‘remaining stuff’ by this point. Piglet as a big fan of baked beans got that and tuna with his jacket potato (cooked in the embers of the fire for an hour). My wife, on the other hand, is a chronic baked-bean-o-phobe and had a packet of vegetarian chilli. I, as a sort of human dustbin, just had a bit of everything that everyone else was having. Cold. A real flagship final meal of the holiday.
The next day woke with a bittersweet excitement. On one hand it was Piglet’s actual birthday but on the other hand we had to take down the tent and try and work out how the hell we managed to get all the stuff in the car in the first place. Considering how long it took us to try and set up our new tent on the first night; the basic structure came down remarkably quickly. However, shuttling all the stuff to the car took a long time. Mental note: take less stuff next time!
We got on the road, heavily laden from roof box to boot to passenger seat, roughly an hour later than planned. This pushed us dangerously close to lunchtime without a definitive plan for where to eat. Our plan for the day was the stop at Bedgebury Forest on the way back home. A quick website trawl implied that they had a kitchen with some allergy info although not 100% clear what we might be able to eat. After getting throughly confused with the Sat Nav (missing a turning and then wondering why on earth it wanted us to double back on ourselves), we were relieved to find no queues to get onto the site and a handful of spaces in an otherwise pretty busy car park.
We wandered down to the main centre containing the information centre and cafe (with me pining at the bike hire centre as we passed – another day…). Unsurprisingly, considering it was probably the first genuinely hot weekend of the year, the place was rammed and we’d turned up at peak lunchtime. It was the kind of place where you needed a table to order and so my wife and Piglet stayed out in the sun while I went in to investigate. The queue was fairly long but never-the-less moving. There didn’t seem to be anyone to obviously ask about ingredients so I joined the queue armed with the families preferences from the menu, but knowing that at this stage anything suitable would do.
I’ll be honest I wasn’t feeling very confident. In the kind of setup where you queue to speak to a cashier to order, allergen info can be difficult to process with such gaps between the customer facing staff and the kitchen itself. Coupled with a long queue, a hot day and what was probably already a stressed kitchen I was only really empowered by knowing I had to feed my son and find some sort of solution. When I got to the front of the queue and explained our requirements I could sense the anxiety in the woman serving me that it wasn’t going to be easy to resolve. That said, they got hold of someone from the kitchen who did a wonderful job of running between me and the kitchen to check and advise on what we could eat. By sheer luck the thing we most wanted, nachos, turned out to be really easily customised. We were able to choose two different toppings and guacamole. They even offered vegan cheese which I hadn’t even realised was an option (we didn’t take it but still…). Even my first choice for Piglet of fish goujons and chips turned out to be fine. I’m not sure whether it was my sense of decorum or the insurmountable counter that stopped me hugging the chef who had so kindly (literally) run back and forth checking for me.
We sat outside in the sun amongst the masses waiting for our food overlooking a gorgeous lake and feeling very smug as we waited for the food to arrive. What arrived were two of the largest, most appealing bowls of nachos I’d ever seen (I was pretty hungry by this point). They even reconfirmed the dietary requirements as they handed them to us. For a Forestry Commission cafe this was better service than I’ve had in many a restaurant. The food was delicious (and impressively spicy), even if Piglet did want to eat all of my nachos dipped in guacamole rather than any of his dinner. It might have been his birthday but I wasn’t going to let him have any of my pickled jalapenos, even if I did have about 20! I was really impressed by the cafe and hope we can find an excuse to go back some day.
Post-lunch continued the hunt for Zog, more formally this time, in the form of an official “Zog activity trail”. It’s something the Forestry Commission have done for a few years by having Julia Donaldson book-themed activity walks. We did The Highway Rat one last year at Alice Holt nearer to home. I found a perfect example to embarrass myself when it came to buying the activity pack: You get to choose a sticker of one of the 7 dragons when purchasing. Naturally I picked Zog. I was tempted to give Piglet the choice but I knew he’d just want to take one of each. I think the woman at the information centre had underestimated our familiarity with the book as she congratulated me for choosing Zog. I felt compelled to say that not only did we know it was Zog but we actually had names for all of the (unnamed in the book) dragons in the story. I think she thought I was joking until Piglet reeled off the names “Pong, Charlie, Dino, Pete, Zog, and Grumpy” as I showed him the stickers. I’ve never felt such pride and humiliation at the same time.
I won’t walk you through the entire Zog trail in detail but Piglet was over the moon with it. Each sign/activity/direction post was just out of view from the next so Piglet literally sprinted from one to the next, barely stopping for breath. On top of that the trail is (deliberately) spread out over their kids activity trail so there are various climbing frame/play areas every few hundred meters. Granted Piglet was a little bit small for some of them but he was just so excited at every stage. I’ll be honest, my heart left my mouth for a second when he decided to swing from just his arms at the top of a 15ft slide before flying down. For context he’s often quite cautious about a 3ft slide in our local park just to show how much he was enjoying himself. Also I had no idea he was strong enough to do that either!
Naturally with Piglet fully engaged and my wife in full teacher-mode we completed every section of the activity trail; gaining 2 golden stars in the process (out of 5 – you don’t want to over reward, do you…). Finding a huge cut out of Zog at the end of the trail worked beautifully with the idea that the entire holiday was based around finding him in the first place. Full of nachos, bathed in glorious sunshine and all thoroughly entertained, it had turned out to be a very successful day. The place is beautiful too, I feel like we only just scratched the surface. I’d love to go back one day.
We clambered back into the car and headed home just as the car park was about to empty. The journey home was punctuated by a stop in at Wagamamas, in which it became very clear that there aren’t many options that exclude all three of Soya, Milk and Gluten. Nevertheless we arrived home full, exhausted, and most importantly, happy. Piglet’s birthday completed for another year with a very happy 3 year old. Bring on next year.