Happy New Year

   Very wet water meadows at Arundel 

Happy New Year to all my lovely family and friends, and to all those blogging friends who've been kind enough to comment on my blogs over the years.

Wined, dined and definitely cosseted

We've finally returned to base camp after a wonderful visiting tour with our delightful family, oh how lovely it is to have lots of children and grandchildren to share the festivities with.

As you may remember we landed in Bristol on a disappointingly rainy day, which managed to get worse on the second day. We arrived at our friend Carrol's house like 2 drowned rats on her doorstop and the walk was only 10 minutes from the caravan site.

Still we had a wonderful visit with warming winter soup, wine of course, and chocolate cheesecake for pudding :-) we had lots to catch up on and before we knew it, it was nearly dark again and time to brave the return journey. By this time the rain had turned to horizontal hail stones and we were twice as wet as the morning walk......my boots were even slushy inside.....yuk! No sightseeing this trip.

The wind was gusting, this being the night if the big storms and our poor little van was doing her best to stay upright, but we made it through to the morning. The iron gate had been ripped of its hinges so my gallant DH had to help remove it before we could get out and on our way to Cardiff.

Thank goodness we arrived in sunshine  and were able to go for a lovely walk. Our little grandson was on great form the whole visit, especially on Christmas day.

is it a tree or a cocktail??

it's OK dad I don't need to share your laptop any more ....

And then it was dad's turn to remember what it was like to be a baby taking his very first steps.....

After all that activity it was time to take a break in the park.

look mum no hands!

told you this'd be fun dad.... 

think you should let me have the hat though.......

Think it must be time for dinner now, all that walking has made us all hungry.

And what a lovely spread it was too, we were wined and dined to perfection, thank you so much for a lovely Christmas day.

Of course someone had to sleep off all the food didn't they......

And the crowning glory was a very special gift for our lovely summerhouse.

Don't you just love the hand worked cross stitch tablecloth, a gift from our daughter Nikki.

All too soon it was time to head back to the wilds of the South East and leave Wales behind.

......a nice day for the bridge crossing for a change....

We made very good time to our family group get together at our daughter Hannah's house, sadly we were all so pleased to see each other and had so much to talk about that all thoughts of photos went out of the window.

All except for the ritual breaking up of the gingerbread house....

After which presents were exchanged and what thoughtful ones they were too.

magic..... for someone with poor circulation, thank you Hannah and family

And this gorgeous scarf from Nikki and family, thank you..

It was so lovely to all get together for just a few hours, thanks to Hannah for hosting again this year.

And so onto Nikki and her family for our last Christmas dinner, yesterday. We had a beautiful roast lamb with all the trimmings, expertly carved by husband Adam.....

hurry up dad we're really hungry....

oh well might as well pull a cracker while we're waiting!

After all that eating us girls went for a lovely walk to the local antique barn, it's enormous and we had such a great look round, getting lots of ideas. 

And as if you could top that Nikki's husband Adam cooked us a five star full English breakfast this morning, thank you all for making this such a special stay.

We'd like to say a great big thank you to all of you for making our Christmas such a wonderful one this year.

Christmas starts early with the nomads

The largest possible tree in a domestic living room.

Christmas has come early to the nomads  this  year, starting with a lovely visit to our eldest daughter Pru and her family, last night. We had a superb meal and afterwards swaped our presents.

I am now the proud owner of a playmate for my mouse Milly, I think he will be Marceau as he looks definitely French. 

And he must be a tailor with his cleverly concealed tape measure. 

I also now own a very posh ( and trendy ) well known branded hoody, which I've only removed to go to bed, since last night, I love it.

Thank you all for a lovely evening.

We headed off this morning to Bristol to visit our friend Carrol tomorrow and are now safely booked into a walled caravan sight next to the warfe, good job too with dire weather forecast for tomorrow.

We managed a couple of walks between showers and I even had some time sketching the narrow boats, lovely! 

We went out to get some night time shots of the lights too.

That was after dinner in our cosy nomad wagon.

Christmas wishes too to all the kind people who drop by my blog and take the time to leave a comment .

A lovely surprise

On Friday we went down to the allotment again as the sun was shining and it was forecast to be a nice day. While waiting for the coffee to brew I thought I'd have a play with the laminate flooring that our son and daughter in law gave us when they moved into their new house. Needless to say I was clueless as to how to fix the boards together, and a after a cup of coffee my DH decided he'd have a go........ just a test you understand.

The deal was that I had to finish making the window dressing curtains for the flat that I'd started 3 years ago, before he would lay the floor, anyway I wasn't sure I liked it. However a change of pattern orientation and properly fixed, I was over the moon with the little sample piece he'd completed.

And guess what, he's almost finished the job, what a sweetie! At least 2 weeks worth of brownie points I think....

I'm showing off here..... had you guessed?

Well, we all know that  the way to a man's heart is a good lunch, don't we girls?

Who'd have thought we could eat outside in the sunshine in December, we have such a lovely sun trap here and the summerhouse gets really toasty too.

But this won't get the floor done. There was a reason for this pic of our eaten lunch, I forgot to lay out these fantastic sunny napkins bought for us by our friend Carrol.

And so to the almost finished floor...

Doesn't it look brilliant! On a practical note it will keep out the dust, be so much easier to keep clean and help to insulate the summerhouse.

Oh yes..... and the curtains are definitely promised for immediately after Christmas 2016.... oops! I mean 20014.

A huge thank you to my DH for such an unexpected surprise, I love the result. Thank you too to Dan and Sue for the flooring, and to all our family and friends who've given us so many lovely treasures for our special little retreat.

A little TLC

It seems some things in life are destined to be a little neglected, one of which appears to be my everyday blog, probably because most of my time is spent making work to fill the pages of my other one 

Still I'm here now with pics that have been waiting patiently for an airing, not least a much needed TLC session in the summerhouse.

I got fed up with waiting for myself to finish the painting and decided to dress the inside with all the lovely things we'd collected before we even had it.

Our lovely sunny tea/coffee set,  I thought we'd only got 2 cups so that was a nice surprise.

Jazzy pegs, almost forgotten.

....and who could forget Frederica the lovely frog pot? and 2 gorgeous boxes which once housed equally gorgeous mugs from our daughter Pru, now they house dried peppermint tea, yummy!

.....the clock gently ticks the time away and reminds us when it's teatime.

Ooo! is is that time already?

And through 'the square window' (on its side), you might be lucky and see the fairies who live here when we don't, and put all the things back in the wrong place.

The lovely purple rag rugs given to us by our lovely friend Carrol will soon be matched by a new purple cover for the rocking chair, courtesy of lots of wonderful cotton corduroy donated by our super daughter, Hannah.

We have had some wonderful respite mornings and afternoons lately, when the sun poked its head out from behind a cloud. 

Another little tale of TLC was a lovely family walk we had at a local beauty spot. What you can see in the distance is the traces of a main road as it used to make its way round the hill before a tunnel was built.

We all had to walk fast as it was bitterly cold...

....but what a lovely comforting sight met us round the corner...

...the remnants of a bonfire that the land clearers had left gave us enough warmth to make our way back.

...but not before I shot this lovely textured log.

And one more act of TLC that mustn't go unmentioned was a gift of superb Earl Grey leaf tea bought for us by our daughter Nicola at the Christmas fair on sunday. It's such a treat to wake up to, here's their website if you should be tempted Tiger Spring Tea

Norfolk

We've just got back from a lovely visit to Norfolk, with the only small irritation that the county seems to have a mobile internet blackout, only operating on something called GPRS, which seems to only manage to download emails to read and not send!

Being retirees we decided to break the 4 hour journey at a lovely night stop for the nomad wagon, and having arrived in the dark we were rewarded with this lovely view in the morning.

Couldn't resist a bit of a play in the camera 

And a very quick sketch before breakfast..... Straight from our window, doesn't get much better than that.

A page from the log books I keep of our travels.

We were meeting up with my husabnd's brother and his wife on a lovely Caravan Club site within walking distance of the Queen's summer retreat at Sandringham, very posh.

We had a couple of nights here having a lovely catch up....

The boys did their bird spotting while we girls caught up with familly stuff.

We did do a bit of token bird watching too....

And I snatched the opportunity for a bit of creative stuff...

All to soon it was time to move on and we went to another part of the of the coast.....

And as the dusk came in we got an amazing sunset, the clouds reminded me of the 'old masters' paintings.

I just had time for a quick watercolour before the light went.

Sadly we had to cut the trip short due to a 'dying tooth', ( mine) getting more and more insistent, so unfortunately we missed the best sunny day of the trip, still there's always next time.