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.

Birthday celebrations

Last weekend our whole family, the dynasty as we like to call it, joined together to celebrate 3 birthdays, two 40's and one 16th.

We hired a 13 bedroomed country house near Lyme Regis in Dorset.

We had a huge kitchen to prepare our celebratory meal.

Which as you can imagine was quite an undertaking.

First up is our grandson Ben with his lovely mum, he was celebrating his 16th birthday.

And our 2 lovely daughters celebrating their 40th, no they're not twins, one of them had her birthday a while back.

Lots of presents were enjoyed

A lovely scarf

A new watch 

A new cover for a very much desired new   iPad mini 

And a very honoured photo of our beautiful eldest granddaughter (who hates her photo being taken) and her lovely mum. 

Inwrapping yet another very special present was our daughter Hannah with her eldest daughter Bethany.

This is what the weekend was about.....family

From the youngest to the eldest (me) everyone had a fabulous time.

The highlight of the weekend was a lovely nostalgic slide show, painstakingly put together by my husband, of our family's beginnings, it still brings tears to my eyes, just thinking about it.

Us on our wedding day June 4th 1971

Thanks to everyone for making it happen.

Goodnight from Dungeness

We had a lovely morning roaming around 

Maintenance on the lighthouse....

A classic view of the old one, in front of the power station that made it obsolete.

 

And then a beautiful sunset, after the rain this afternoon and before the lightening this evening, the weather can change within the hour here.

Goodnight everyone......

Goodbye to France

Well the trip is now over, we've said our goodbyes to Le Sap with a lovely evening walk...

And headed off on the next hop to Hardelot plage which is a wonderful seaside town about an hour from Calais.

This time of year it's almost deserted as most of the houses appear to be for holiday home residents. And what homes they have too....

The whole place is full of such romantic follies.

And so to Calais and an uneventful voyage home, with of course a detour to our wonderful Dungeness, well it would be rude not to.....

Roll on next year.....