United Kingdom part 1

Not much happened after my last post before the holiday finally started, just getting things packed and organised and off Gwendy and I went with Easyjet towards Bristol! Since we went away for 2 full weeks there's loads to tell, a bit too much for 1 post, so I'll split it up in a few shorter ones, which will follow the next few days. Lots of pictures to guide you though :)

The weather was fine in the Netherlands, but not so great in the UK unfortunately... when we picked up the car it was already slightly raining, but still light. The further southeast we got the harder it started to rain and the darker it got, until finally after 3 hours of terrible rain, wind and darkness we arrived just in time at the first campsite: Kingfisher in Gosport (they closed the bar at 11, we were there about 10 minutes to 11). At first we thought about sleeping in the car because it was raining so hard putting up a tent would be a disaster. Fortunately after a little while it almost stopped raining for a few minutes, so we put up the tent as quickly as possible and were finally able to get some sleep. It was very very cold that night, so when we went out the next morning to buy a camping cooker etc I also got a nice extra fleece blanket :D Ofcourse we needed some food as well and by chance we found a lidl, so that was a cheap morning! In the afternoon we decided to go to the Isle of Wight by boat so we could enjoy the view from the boat towards the Island and ofcourse the mainland. On the island we bought a busticket and off we went. Lots of beautiful things to see and do, but a downside was that the busses stopped running after six :( We ended up bussing all around the island, but not much time to spend anywhere. No worries, we had loads of fun anyway and saw all sorts of beautiful things along the way. I have to make a short remark about all the pictures: it looks a lot of the time like we had really bad weather, but in real life it was actually very nice most of the time. It was a bit cloudy most of the days, but some sun as well and very nice temperatures. So despite the grayish pictures we had lovely weather most of the time! In the evening we warmed up some lovely chilli con carne (from a can ;) and made some custard to get the English feeling. After a lovely feed we went to the bar at the campsite and made plans for the next day.

First thing on the list was Arundel Castle. A fabulous castle, where in one of the wings the owners still live! We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but nothing stopped us outside the buildings :) Amazing how many castles there are still in good shape and loads of them also have their own little chaple, with beautiful graves. Not all of them are this big and amazing ofcourse, but still. We had a few hours stroll around the place and didn't see all of it.... Unbelievable. Wonderfull big gardens as well. Of we went to Brighton, with its famous pier and Royal Pavillion. Finding a parking lot was a nightmare and we ended up in the middle of the centre of town with a lot of traffic, very creepy narrow and unbelievable steep roads and me having some issues of getting the car up and running those steep hills after we had to stop halfway on them... We managed to get a lovely spot in the end, just near the waterfront, much better than we had expected! Off to the pier where we saw this great band playing (so great in fact that we bought the cd), called 'A Sound Mind'. Do check out their website! We had a stroll around the pier and checked out the Royal Pavillion from the outside. Time to head to Petworth on our way back towards the campsite, because our guidebook was raving about the amazing gardens and the changes of seeing deer. Unlucky for us they were having a concert that night and we couldn't go out into the gardens (we just figured that out when we got there, too bad). It was a lovely drive around the area though and we enjoyed our broccoli and mash after that. It was a bit wettish so we decided to cook in the gazebo close to the campsite bar and a lot of people commented on our cooking, but it was really nice and we were invited for a beer by a few guys. So after the cleaning up we had some free beers (thanks to Robert and his friend) and off to sleep because we had another busy day planned.

You'll find out what we did in the next episode ;)