Regular followers will remember that on our last UK camping trip (before the South African adventures), we had accidentally gone camping when there was a yellow wind warning and ruined our gazebo!  Since then we have bought a replacement gazebo (more about it in a future post) and wanted to try it out this weekend before camping with a group of friends for the Bank Holiday next week.

Having learnt our lesson, we looked at the forecast before we went – and looked not only at temperature and rainfall, but also windspeed.   Our hearts sank when we saw there was yet again a ‘yellow weather warning’ for high winds due to storm Hannah.  Who invited her?!

We were just going for a brief overnight stay, and the warning was scheduled to finish at 3pm, so we drove down to Stoneywish in Sussex anyway and decided to reassess the situation when we got there.

Of course once we got there, it would have needed to have been terrible conditions for us to have actually gone home again.  Our ‘spaceship’ tent is surprisingly robust, but being as it was very windy and the ground was soft, we pegged out all the guys with ‘delta pegs’.

Delta pegs are odd looking things, and are counter-intuitive about how to put them in, but they really do work well in the wind.  I think the idea is that when the tent pulls on the guy rope, rather than pulling the peg out, the unusual shape almost means the stake bit of the peg is pushed further in.  However they work, they did their job and our tent flapped and rustled but didn’t move!

We were even brave enough to leave it unsupervised for a short while to go for a walk.  We found a footpath through a free-range chicken farm, where the path goes straight through the chicken field, which was fun!!

We weren’t brave enough to put the brand new gazebo up in the gale, so we left that task until the morning… but that’s a story for another day!

R & L