rain Archives - Becoming a Stay at Home Mum

On our recent holiday down south we decided as it was only an hour or so from where we were staying in Dorset, that we would like to take the opportunity to visit Stonehenge. We picked a day and booked our tickets in advance for the Sunday and made our plans. It is run by English Heritage but National Trust members get free entry too (woohoo!) so if you are thinking of going it is worth considering membership of one or the other as tickets to Stonehenge are quite expensive in themselves. Sunday turned out to be a really wet and miserable day unfortunately, but we decided to stick with our plans and head over, hoping for a bit of let up.

When we arrived it wasn’t actually raining, though it was freezing! We had taken waterproofs for the rain but thought it should still be quite warm so hadn’t taken jumpers for hubs or I – big mistake as it was so cold, we ended up buying some rather fetching Stonehenge hoodies from the gift shop. (It’s actually quite amusing that most have my hoodies have been bought from a gift shop for the same reason, incl. one in NY and one in San Francisco, clearly I regularly under-estimate how warm I will be!).

We originally planned on heading straight for lunch, and then going out to see Stonehenge itself afterwards, but as it wasn’t raining we decided to make the most of the let up and head straight up there (thank goodness we did). So we had a ride on the bus with the kiddies and got to Stonehenge itself. There is a path part of the way round and then grass to walk around the rest of the site. You can’t get up close to the stones which is a shame but understandable.

We had great fun taking some silly selfies of us all with Stonehenge in the background (or not, depending how good our aim was!).

It was very bleak though and Monkey was getting a bit moany so we did have to have a good run around to keep him happy – I think a lot of other people there thought we were bonkers but Monkey was happy so that’s all that matters.

It’s a shame the weather was so bad as we really didn’t want to stay there long and after one time round we went back to the bus and back to the visitor centre…. where, would you adam and eve it… there had been a power cut. The first one ever apparently. But this affected all lighting, the toilets, the exhibitions and worst of all the cafe!

After a bit of queueing and wondering what we could actually eat we managed to get literally the last 2 cups of tea they could get out of what hot water they had. We had sandwiches as there was no soup or any other hot food as obviously they had no power. Not good on such a cold day but at least we got hot drinks. By the time we had our food the rain had well and truly returned and the bus loads of people returning from Stonehenge were all soaked to the skin and poor things couldn’t even get a hot drink so I was glad we had come back when we had.

After our light lunch we wandered over to the exhibitions… where nothing was working so there wasn’t a huge amount to see.

Lights off and blank screens, very disappointing!

LM needed some milk so we hung around a bit rather than just leaving and I’m glad we did stay as the power did eventually come back on. If she hadn’t needed a feed I think we may just have come away and we wouldn’t have seen any of it.

With the power working again there is a great display where you stand as if in the middle of the stones and see it through the years and at different seasons. All of the displays and videos were great when they were working too and really interesting.

There are some roundhouses to see outside and we did start to go out to see them but it was so wet that we gave up and just got back in the car to drive back to the cottage.

The joys of british summertime eh? One day gorgeous sunshine, the next absolutely miserable.

You may have seen that we have just had a very lovely holiday in Dorset. We have been house sitting for just over a week for some friends of ours who live in a very cute, quaint little country cottage. It is picture postcard pretty but also a little run down with cracks in walls and damp ceilings and TONNES of spiders!

It is also in the most gorgeous setting, on a farm in the middle of the countryside. The farmer’s (massive) house is nearby along with a few holiday cottages they rent out but otherwise it is just surrounded by fields, trees and rolling hills.

Being on a farm there are lots of animals around too, cows, horses, sheep, dogs, a”barn cat” who is a mouser that lives in the barn. She’s also about 1010 yrs old, very gentle and so good with the kiddies! The little ones have loved stroking her and even when LM has gotten a little over excited and pulled her fur (eek) she has barely flinched! Lovely pussy cat.

We had the real extremes of weather, from blazing sun to torrential rain and we obviously had some highs and lows. Some highs of the trip include gorgeously sunny days out to the coast and on steam railways to castles (posts about those to follow) and actually a wonderful day at Stonehenge which was in parts disastrous but also lucky and just good fun, despite being a very wet day! More of that to come in another post.

We did have some lows too, including the most disastrous trip to the beach ever. I was on my own with the kids while hubs got his head down to do some work and as the forecast was for sun headed to the beach. It rained a little on the way but hoped we were headed to blue sky. I had researched and found what I thought was a sandy beach not too far away. Then we arrived and saw this mountain of stones at the edge of a completely stony beach.

Walked around a little and could find no sandy beach so at the lowest point I could find proceeded to make a few trips up and down the hill of stones to get me, 3 bags, buggy, both kids and a wind shield onto the beach. Only to be faced with an evem steeper decline on the other side of the hill towards the sea.

LM decided she didn’t like the noise of the sea so I didn’t want to get any closer, though it was blimmin windy at the top of the hill! I started to set up the wind shield,and the heavens (which had been darkening but I had been ignoring in my task of just getting up the hill) opened. So we ended up huddled behind the windshield, both LM and Monkey crying because they were cold and wet,trying to eat a picnic. Then the rain stopped, a few more trips back down the hill later, more screaming from the kiddies,and I packed them back in the car. Disaster!! Talk about best laid plans!! My feet hurt so much after all the running up and down the stones barefoot (my flip flops made it even worse so had to go with bare feet) and that was by far the low point of the week.

Some of the best bits though were seeing my kiddies having a whale of a time on the playpark on the farm (which had an awesome boat swing that I want to get for our swing at home) and just in running around the cottage garden.

Oh and watching Monkey jumping in muddy puddles on the very wet days!

Lots of happy times and though hubs was working a lot of the time we also got a lot of time together as a family which has been very lovely. By the end I both didn’t want to leave and get back to normality, but was also looking forward to getting home and our creature comforts, family and friends.

Becoming a Stay at Home Mum

Can I really do this?

rain

Visiting Stonehenge in the rain

Our Dorset Holiday