About Me

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Hi! I'm Eunice and I live in Bolton, Lancashire, with my two dogs Sophie and Sugar and an assortment of cats - well it used to be Sophie and Sugar, now it's Sophie and Poppie. I first began camping back in 1997 when my then partner took me to Anglesey for my birthday weekend. We slept in the back of the car - a hatchback - using the cushions off the settee at home as a mattress, and cooked and brewed up on a single burner camping stove. The site was good, the views were great, the weather fantastic and I was completely hooked. Following that weekend we got a two-man tent and some proper accessories and returned to Anglesey two weeks later, then over time we progressed to a three-man tent followed by an old trailer tent, then a new trailer tent, a campervan and finally a caravan. When my partner decided that the grass was greener on the other side of the street - literally - in April 2009 and I suddenly found myself alone after fifteen years, I decided there was no way I was going to give up camping and caravanning if I could cope on my own. This blog is the story of my travels, trials and tribulations since becoming a solo camper - I hope you like it

Monday June 11th 2012 - Home in the sunshine

The morning arrived with more blue sky and sunshine and a distinct reluctance to pack up and go home; if it's cloudy or raining then I don't mind packing up, but when it's sunny I always feel that by going home I'll be missing something. I sometimes wonder if other campers feel like that on going home day, or is it just me?

With Sophie and Sugar mooching about on the end of their line outside the awning I made tea and toast and had a leisurely al fresco breakfast then started the process of tidying up and packing up. I think the dogs realised it was going home day when I put their bed out on the grass in preparation for taking the awning down, and they didn't look happy at all - in fact they looked like I felt! It was just gone noon when I rolled the awning into its bag and stowed it away in the van, then with a check round the pitch for any unaccounted-for tent pegs I put the dogs in the back of the van and drove off the site for the last time.


As per usual on going home day I drove down to the promenade, parked up and took Sophie and Sugar for a good walk along the beach before setting off for home properly, but driving along the main road I made one brief and final stop. Set back off the road in a decent sized garden was an unusually-shaped house which had intrigued me every time I passed it, and I'd often thought about stopping to take a photo of it but had never actually done so. It was one of those places that you catch a fleeting glimpse of while driving past and you think "Oh that looks nice" but you never actually see it properly - well now I was just about to. There was a handy lay-by just across the road from it so I pulled in there and went across to have a proper look and found that the house was actually the bottom half of a windmill with other bits added on. It looked really nice, and just the sort of quirky place I'd like to live if I could; I would have loved to be able to look round inside but as that was never going to happen I had to be happy with a photo of it from just inside the gate.


That was my final photo of the holiday, and once I was back on the road I didn't stop again until I got home. It was a very pleasant drive back in the sunshine and I was well ahead of the start of the rush hour so there were no delays, and I had plenty of time to chill out before I went to work at 5pm. Weather-wise the holiday had been a bit of a mixed bag with five good days and five bad ones, but even though I hadn't been to as many places as I would have liked I'd still had a good break - and because I hadn't taken as many photos as I wanted to I had a good excuse to make yet another trip to Anglesey some other time.