Sardines and Cold Showers

Since it's now the last week of July, I suppose we can expect that there will be more people on the camp site. To our delight, the people in the next pitch who seemed to have taken agin us for no readily apparent reason, and would stride across the middle of our pitch, ignoring any kind of social convention or personal space, have finally gone - we fell short of a rousing cheer as they left, although it did occur to us!

However, the number of people being squeezed into the campsite, and onto pitches barely big enough to take their tents has made me feel, again, somewhat guilty for the sheer size of our pitch. We don't actually have a place to park, our pitch not actually having direct access to the roads in the site, but we have truckloads of space!! I'll get pictures. So when a group of 7 chaps was shoehorned into one of the pitches adjacent to our own, I had to keep mumbling to myself "I booked - this is what they gave us - I have NO influence over where we get stuck, you know!"

All these new people, however, seem to have had an adverse affect on the facilities, so that on our return from the beach, somewhat closer to 7 than I'd thought we were going to come back, the showers were cold. It's rather like getting into the water of the surf - your body's hot, so the shower feels that much colder - brrrr!

However, the reason we were so late back from the beach was that the surf was truly awesome! The beach was packed with sun-bathing bodies as far as the eye could see, but still they kept arriving, and so the little patches of privacy (on a beach - are you kidding me?) kept getting smaller and smaller. I'm afraid the mother in me took over at one point as I guerilla sun-factored a young man who was, it transpired, wearing some kind of sun cream with SPF-0 (he showed it to me) written on the bottle! His shoulders were burning, and despite his eye-rolling, I slapped on a bit of cream.

But back to that surf - you didn't need to get very far in before you were being bowled over by every other wave. Lottie and Lizzy were squealing like, well, girls, as they tried to escape the clutching fingers of surf racing up the beach. Every so often one of them would disappear beneath a particularly large wave, come up gasping for breath, and launch herself right back into the water.

Thankfully the glum weather we've been suffering from (and let me tell you, there's NOTHING to write about on the days we don't visit the beach) seems to have moved on, and while there are a few clouds, we're having the blistering heat we'd expect at this time of year in this camp site. As I came away from the beach just before 7 this evening, I could still feel the burn of the sun on my shoulders.