Need some holiday reading for your camping trip? How about this?! It made me laugh out loud!
L
This book about camping holidays made me laugh out loud!
Need some holiday reading?
Author: embraceyourinnergoat
Washing up system #2
Now what about rinsing?
If you’re washing up at a sink that’s easier, but if you’re just in a field and you’ve had to walk to fetch water to wash up with, you need to think it through. By the end of the washing up load, the sudsy water will probably be a bit gross – and even if not, it’s not that nice to eat washing up liquid!
If there’s space and the weather’s nice, we just lay the clean crockery out on the grass in the sun, pour some clean water over and leave them to dry.
An alternative is to use bag 3 as a rinse bag – take it to the tap and put clean water straight in . (See earlier post for the 3 bag washing system!)
Happy washing!
R&L
PS Being as you’re likely to be tipping your dirty washing up water into the hedge, we recommend swapping to an eco-washing up liquid.
Washing up system
Everything works better on a campsite if you have a system. We have a system for washing up which we think you will like:
- Dirties – put all your dirty washing up in a big ikea bag. Everything will fit as it’s huge; you can pop it over your shoulder if you need to walk to a washing up station; when you get home, it’s easy to wipe clean; and it folds up nicely to pack away.
- Washing up bowl – we love our pop up one. It can be packed away neatly without taking up too much space.
- Clean dishes bag – you don’t want to carry the clean washing up back to your tent in the yucky dirty washing up bag. Instead we have one of those heavy duty bags for life to put the clean things in. If you assign a bag to the job and keep it with your washing up stuff, it will always be there when you need it!
The three bag system is definitely the way forward!
Breakfast without the gas stove
Thought you might like this picture of how we cooked our bacon and mushrooms on the fire when we were one gas hob down (see the previous post about why that was!!).
Good huh?! We took a Billy Goat with us this time and put him in charge of this. I think he’s allowed to come again!
Must say a big thank you to Fox’s Bench Ironwork for sending us a replacement hook for our tripod. We love our tripod very much, but we lost one or the hooks at the end of last summer. The nice people there sent us a replacement for free. Thanks guys!
R&L
Some types of fire are better than others!!!
Campfires are great… campsite fires on the other hand are definitely not.
We were giving our Summit portable gas stove one last chance to prove itself. The ignition spark wasn’t working – it’s not unusual that the ignition switches on stoves are temperamental, so we lit it with a match… and voom flames everywhere!!
Fortunately we had a fire blanket in the car and were able to use it to smother the flames. Without this, the fire would have kept growing as there was plenty of gas in the canister. Indeed once the flames were out, the gas kept hissing for a while, so we just left the fire blanket over it and moved it away from our pitch.
Clearly the stove was ruined (but that’s no loss, it wasn’t very good anyway – click here to see a review!), but amazingly the little coffee table it was on cleaned up just fine, and most importantly all the goats were unscathed!
Before your go on your next camping trip PURCHASE A FIRE BLANKET!!
Spring cleaning
We’re having a Spring clean and reorganising this blog… please bear with us while we do this.
If you have any comments on the structure or things you’d like to see, do contact us.
R&L
Cuckoos and Kites
Bank Holiday camping sounds a great idea… until you realise that everyone else in your city has probably had a similar idea and the roads are going to be chock-a-block! Adding to my nervousness was the fact that my poor little car hasn’t been on a long drive for many months – not since an unfortunate spate of breakdowns!
Consequently, I ventured out on our Bank Holiday adventure with some trepidation. I left early to beat the rush and little car behaved herself beautifully…the most stressful part of the journey was the responsibility of choosing where to pitch!
It’s quite a responsibility picking the pitch!! We were camping at Britchcombe Farm, I arrived first and they had four fields for me to choose between. I decided to prioritise evening sun and a nice view of the sunset over proximity to the showers.
We like a campsite without too many rules, and Britchcombe Farm has one main rule which is ‘7 paces’ – you can make fires in the existing burnt patches, but your tents must be 7 paces from the fire. Now when you combine that rule with the number of tents we like to take with us and my preference that all of them were on the flat, it added an extra complication to being the first to arrive!
I felt super proud of myself for getting the kitchen tent up by myself and the fire lit using just one match and no firelighters ( – shame there was no one there to witness it!). I settled down for a cup of tea… and one of our favourite activities – watching other people setup camp! Eventually my friends arrived and we got the other tents up and dinner eaten. I felt pleased with myself for the view of the spectacular skies from our pitch.
It wasn’t until the morning I realised the folly of my pitching decision! We were handy for the water tap…but that meant that each morning we heard everyone else fetch their water for breakfast. It was interesting to eavesdrop on their conversations (apparently silk pyjamas are just the thing for camping!?!), but we’d have preferred a lie in! You live and learn!!
I’ve been given my instructions of which pitch to nab next time…and there will be a next time as it’s a lovely site. The beautiful weather helped, but we enjoyed hearing a cuckoo calling and a red kite circulating overhead. There are footpaths from the campsite allowing you to explore the ridgeway. The only downside is that a road runs between the camping fields. It’s not a busy road, but what traffic there is can be pretty fast.
The ancient chalk white horse is no distance at all from the site. We went for a walk to see it, although it’s actually not that easy to make it out close up – we got a better view on our drive to the pretty pub named after it!
I’m sure we’ll be back again to this site – check out how it scored here.
L
relaxing in Bank Holiday sun at Britchcombe
Last week everyone thought we were mad…
Last week it was freezing cold, everyone thought we were mad to be confidently planning a camping weekend for this bank holiday…but we’re just back from 3 nights of perfect camping weather in Oxfordshire!!
Imagine having to wait until May for our first camping trip of the year?! What’s going on?!!
Look out for a review of our latest campsite find which will follow shortly!
To be fair, we were a little mad last week. Being as we didn’t have time to go camping, we pretended and did some fire cooking in the goat’s garden! It was a little ‘chilly’…. but that makes you appreciate the fire all the more!
North African Chicken Curry was on the menu, followed by chocolate brownies – a new recipe for us. Fortunately we have 3 friends who are equally as mad as us and they claimed they had a good time!
I wonder what the neighbours thought?!
R&L
Fire food in suburbia!
Look what we cooked in the Dutch oven!
Last post I left you hanging, promising pictures of what we’d cooked. Sorry for keeping you in suspense, here they are… suet puddings with veg followed by Danish apple cake!
Suet pastry with beef stew inside
Steaming the puddings – they’re on a wire rack to keep them above the water. Fortunately the Dutch oven lid just fitted on top snuggly
cabbage & carrots in a muslin
potatoes in a muslin
veggies boiling in the water under the rack, the puddings went back on top
pleased with how perfectly they came out!
this greedy goat had 2!!
Dutch apple cake for pudding.
There’s no limit to what you can do with a Dutch oven!!
L
Our latest campsite find
Last weekend we tried out a campsite we’d not been to before – Mellow Farm. For us this is a good find as it isn’t far from South London, just off the A31 near Farnham. Perfect for a one night stay.
Finding the campsite was a bit tricky, but that was mainly down to my poor map reading! Although there weren’t any signs even when we got close.
When we did arrive, we found ourselves in the middle of someone’s wedding! The farm hires out a barn for functions and the wedding party had taken over part of a field with gazebos and their tents.
The most exciting thing about this site is that it has a river running through camping fields. We were there on a very hot sunny weekend and the site was full of children enjoying jumping into the water and paddling.
We were assigned the ox-bow field, which is a small field bounded by the river and surrounded by trees. Its disadvantage was that there is only a water tap at the top of the next field… which would have been less of a problem if we’d remembered to take our water containers! Buy hey, you need to forget something each time, that’s part of the adventure.
As well as trying out a new site, we tried out a new campfire menu… but that will be the subject of our next post.
If you fancy trying our Mellow Farm, be aware that it is only open at weekends. You can see how it scored against our other favourites here: Campsites in England
L&R
