I did it!  I did the camping! And I am never, ever camping in a tent again…

Don’t get me wrong: I loved the outside-ness of it.  I loved the chance to explore somewhere new.  I loved cooking on a camping stove and a barbecue. I even loved listening to the 18 teenagers doing their Duke of Edinburgh expedition who pitched up next to us for a night…

The problem is – and I may have mentioned this before – that I am actually part toad.  I am practically cold blooded.  And even when it has been such a beautifully sunny day that I’d managed to burn the back of my calves on our epic walk, when the sun goes in or a slight breeze starts, I move from ‘just right’ to ‘freezin’ ‘.

Night one, I put on All The Clothes to go and clean my teeth, came back to the (freezin’) tent and just about managed to get my PJs on and get into the sleeping bag and throw over one of the two duvets I had bought with us before the giant shivers took over.

We let Percy sleep in the tent bedroom with us (something he is not allowed to do at home) and he went nuts with the excitement of it all, hurting around and around a lot before settling down.

I had a strange dream that night that I was constantly rolling down a hill.  I’d hoik myself back up the hill only to fall back, over and over.

When I woke up, Mr R was at the bottom of the hill.  And I was too.  I turned out on his excitement, Percy had burst what Mr R had described as an ‘indestructible’ airbed which ‘Percy definitely couldn’t burst’.

Percy, or course, was the only one of the three of us still deep in sleep on the still inflated part of the airbed…

So, the next night, rather than piling those duvets on top of us, we slept with them between us and the ground.  And instead, I piled the picnic blanket and my big coat on top of us.  But it was still freezin’.  And we had to do a lot of stretching in the morning to be able to stand upright.

That was one of the incidents.  And that was the one that has broken this Pogs camping back.  I will leave Mr R to enjoy the tent with the The Boys and we will continue to test out the campervanning option.  Because there you can’t feel the breeze through the walls , or hear snoring from somewhere that isn’t your tent even though it sounds like it could be, and there is no chance you’ll end up sleeping on the ground….

I probably shouldn’t have said that.  We’ve hired a campervan for another trip to celebrate our wedding anniversary in a few weeks… :o)