Whitsand Bay

England is not a country comfortable with hot weather. It clings to its feather duvets, its double-glazed windows, its sturdy, carpeted interiors. In the heat, its citizens wander around looking faintly bewildered, clad in hastily-assembled summer attire, perhaps bought several years ago "just in case the big heatwave showed up" and with the vague hint of mothballs clinging to the undersides.

They peer at the sun and repeat the temporary mantra, "LOVELY weather, isn't it?" They drink hot tea under the hot sun, or underneath rain shelters that for a few weeks out of the year pose as sun shelters. The kids run around as if possessed, revelling in short sleeves.

Then the rain returns and probably 90% of the population is secretly relieved.

Back to our trip - one hot morning, we packed our things and headed to a nearby recommended beach. Sandy and beautiful, it was accessed via a steep cliff hike. E fell asleep on the short drive there.

(Yes, we still have a rear-facing carseat, and I bought one specifically to use as rear-facing, because it's safer - something to do with the proportionality of the weight/size of the head on children under the age of 4 or so leads to more spinal injuries in crashes when forward-facing. Some of the Nordic countries require children to sit rear-facing until the age of 4. Safety lecture over.)

Heading down the path....


View from the top.


And further down the path. Lots of little holiday cottages along the way.


To give you an idea of how far down it was, here's the cliff from below. Yes, going back up was fun.

The little cafe at the bottom had a great way of trekking goods down the steep path. I love seeing unorthodox things like this. Makes me view the local community as a bit more down-to-earth as opposed to the Housing Association Types who freak if your picket fence is painted off-white instead of the appropriate shade of pearl.

We'd borrowed a bucket and spade from the B&B and E went to town in the little tidepools.

After the initial sunscreen pindown and wild running around, E got properly dorked out in hat and sunglasses and set to the business of plopping handfuls of sand into a bucketful of seawater.


It was upon this beach that E constructed his very first four-word sentence. After taking a spill in the ocean and getting a mouthful of water, the young gentleman stood up and proclaimed: "Fall down ocean, yucky!"


That's all for now.