Equipment

One thing you find yourself doing while on a holiday like this, is to think about what you'd like to bring with you next year. As previously discussed, I want a fridge of some sort – Argos will sell me a mini fridge in either white, pink or pink spots for £19.99, and for a very little more, I can get a lovely “Hello Kitty” version. All of these will hold 6 cans of drink (apparently this is a 4 litre fridge), and should manage to keep butter and milk cool during the holiday. And then you find yourself thinking – “Yes, that's all very well, but for just a tiny bit more than that, I can get a 6 litre fridge...”

And then there's a broom. You see, I've got a brush (I think there may have been a dustpan once, but that's long gone), but actually it'd be nice to NOT have to bend down to brush out the tent.

And an awning/gazebo type thing, so that when it rains I can cook under cover, and not have the rain dripping down my neck.

I mean, most of the ideas I had for this holiday have been OK – obviously the fridge idea would have been better if I had done some long term testing of the 12-volt socket, to see if, on extended use overheating would occur and the thing would cut out in an annoying manner. As it happens, you can get a block of ice down at the shop, and as luck would have it, on our way up the hill today we found a random block of ice melting on the side of the path, so we picked that up and shoved it into the fridge. Milk and butter doing the NOT melty thing by the end of the lovely hot afternoon. The clothes rail was definitely a good thing, although persuading the girls to actually hang their clothes up on it is proving a bit more tricky than I'd expected.

And, I'll have you know, those “stupid” solar glow lights that everyone said were a complete waste of money have actually been more use than you'd expect – since I got 4 of them, they provide sufficient light in the tent at night to help anyone wanting to go the the loo, or, as happened, find the tent when stumbling home a bit later on. Bringing last year's roll mats to use as entrance mats on which to deposit shoes on the way into the tent hasn't been a total failure, either.

In fact, those "stupid" solar lights are SO bright that when Emma and Neisha came in last night and failed to turn them off before going to bed, the light was bright enough that when I woke early, they stopped me going back to sleep.