What a beautiful morning! Couch cough! It rained most of the night & here it was time to pack up & it still wont stop raining. We woke this morning to a nice puddle forming in the tent due to poor tent design. Water that should fall down the side of the tent, also flowed into our tent. Scavenging for something to mop up with, Paul throws me a chamois, which I am sure is about a century old! To prove my point it kept falling to pieces as I was wiping up!

Pulling the tent down in the rain was fun to say the least! As Paul pulled the extremeties up & threw stuff in the car, I continued to pack & mop water. When it came to pull the tent down it had to be timed with a stop in the rain, and then a quick flick off of excess water before quickly packing it away. There was no way we were going to get that tent dry in a hurry, it was well & truly soaked.

The rain continued on through the day as we headed towards our next stop Bournmouth. The heavy stuff had slowed down by the time we got there, but now it was just a misty wetness. We did have plans of meeting up with a previous client of mine, and a current client of Pauls, but he was delayed further north. Not to be disuaded, we still ventured out in the misty rain for a look around the boardwalk of Bournmouth.

The town of Bournemouth is quite a messy planned town. There didn’t seem to be a lot of thought that went into the planning of it. Even the poor satnav got slightly confused.

We went for a walk along the boardwalk & paid to go on the pier. I was surprised to see so many actually surfing & swimming. The surf sucked to say the least, just a lot of chop, and it was pretty cold. But I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. I presume it must have decent surf & have a decent beach life at other times, because there seemed to be a lot of surf & beachshops around.

We had a brief walk along the promenade along the beach, then made our way back to the car. On the way we stopped to get some fish & chips to pig out on for lunch. The drizzle was somewhat annoying, it just surrounded you as you wallked, so when I got back to the car I was soaked again.

After lunch we had a drive around to check out another ex client of mines business, which on the streets on Bournemouth proved somewhat difficult. We ended up driving around in circles for a long time before we realized that the satnav needed a break to get reaquainted with where we were. But like everything else we had done, it was all an adventure.

It was now time to head to Stonehenge. I had looked forward to this for a long time. The rain got heavier & heavier as we drove along. When we finally got there the rain had stopped, but it didn’t look promising that it would have stopped, so we still wore our jackets (remembering that mine wasn’t waterproof!). I stopped & bought a ‘Stonehenge Rocks’ t-shirt on the way to the entrance gate.

Stonehenge isn’t as free to walk around as you would think. There are tourist gift shops, payment entrances, marked pathways & routes to take. One thing that I did find nifty was the audio packs that you got to carry around, which provided a commentary of the rocks & myths surrounding them. It was quite interesting to listen to, unfortunately it was so wet that it was hard to protect your camera from the rain while listening to the audio pack. Paul had to shelter me on several occassions just so I could take photos & have a listen.

In the end the rain got the better of us as it started to pour down even harder. We quickly moved our way around the rocks back to the car, where I quickly grabbed a dry t-shirt out of my bag to throw on. I was soaked to the skin & freezing!

We were booked to stay at Devizes camp ground for a couple of days as of tonight, bt the thought of setting up the tent in this downpour totally turned us off. We sat in the car for a while checking out various other means of covered accomodation on the net, but we were pretty much out of luck. We then made the decision to continue on to Paul’s place & bunk there for a couple of days before we headed off to Jamaica Inn.

Pauls house was a 3 hour drive from Stonehenge & we arrived there pretty close to midnight. I fell asleep for part of the end part of the journey & woke t find us travelling down this really narrow road surrounded by hedges. The satnav was giving instructions “turn left at the road”, “turn right at the road”, “turn right at the road”. Aparently roads around here didn’t have a name, so that was pretty mucch what they were called “the road”! It was pretty scary when other cars came at us, but Paul explained how these tiny little indents along the road were pull over points to allow the oncoming car to pass. If you want to get your blood pumping, travel one of these roads!

When we got to Pauls we stayed in a caravan close to his property (house). When we arrived & shovelled ourselves into the van we found we had no net access, so we hit the sack. Paul was pretty tired after all the driving he had done.

Tomorrow it’s meet his family & have a look around the area. Then get everything dried out! We had a car full of soggy clothes, tents, etc!

Bournemouth Photos on Flickr

Stonehenge Photos on Flickr