Where's Frankie?

Only a week to go (we hope)

Tuesday 13th October

We are starting to run out of England time now. We did our four week stewarding stint in Chipping Norton, came back for the MOT, service and a quick visit to mum and then off for more stewarding at Porth Beach.

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Porth Beach Holiday Park is a great site. Just over the road is the huge, flat beach with the sun setting over it every night, even I can take a pretty picture. £11 per night with electric, hot, clean showers and toilet block, washing up facilities and launderette, fantastic site with a pub and bar right on the door step. We even had some members from the Chipping Norton meet who thought that we were such good stewards that they came to see us at Porth (or something like that).

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The site is very popular with surfers and there were lots of VW campers catching the waves.

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Young lady fishing, she didn’t catch anything but this is where Tony insisted that we would catch some big ones! Silly boy, what you need to do is fish off the rocks to the right. I went with Trevor and Les and we caught loads of mackerel, when I say we caught loads of mackerel what I mean is Trevor and I caught loads of mackerel and Les helped us carry them all home.

Trevor had a big fright, as he was reeling in he saw a large black shape and thinking he had caught a whale began reeling in very quickly. It turned out to be a seal nicking all the fish off his line and then laughing at him.

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Brand new awning – came down Monday morning in the strong winds. Unfortunately at 3am in the morning the main habitation door is blocked up with awning and the side door is blocked by Lucy snoring in bed. I had to wait until it was getting up time to sort it all out.

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Some crazy EEDA members looking like penguins, if they had known that there were seals in the water they may not have gone in.

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Just to the left of where this photo was taken is the Mermaid public house, not somewhere I would usually frequent but my fellow members insisted that I take them to the Thursday quiz night. There must have been 13 of us the first Thursday night so we split into two teams, boys and girls and needless to say the boys trounced the girls winning the first table prize and the overall prize. We let the girl win a table prize and the runner up prize.

The girls thought that we had been cheating and challenged us to a rematch the following week. Didn’t do them any good, we trounced them again. By the third week they had gotten fed up with being also rans so we let them join us for a third victory in a row. In total EEDA managed to get £90 in food vouchers, £50 in beer tokens and 2 bottles of pink bubbly.

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We witnessed the red moon – nearly. This was taken many hours before the actual event, I did look out late at night but it was cold and damp and I thought you wouldn’t notice the difference.

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Lucy and I didn’t get out much owing to the huge responsibilities that we felt we owed the DA! We did manage to walk to Newquay a few times, there may have been a Wetherspoons or two there, we might have been in both of them (on the same day), we might have had more than we should have – hey ho.

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We are very nearly ready to be on our way back to France now. Only a couple of things have been taken out of Frankie, the microwave, the smoker and a couple of saucepans. I’m down to my last bottle of gin, Lucy is down to her last 5 litres of Sangria (part of her five a day, the others being Baileys, Vodka, Ameretto and Cider).

You may remember that we had an engine warning light come on in Portugal, I was hoping it was a fuel filter but it turns out to be the throttle body, an expensive Fiat part which is known to cause problems and is due to be put right next Monday / Tuesday. We’re hoping to catch the ferry on Thursday if all goes well with the repairs.

We do have a bit of a plan, we actually have part of a route mapped out already and a possible Christmas meet up with the family.

We’ve also got a cooking plan which has been working wonders for us over the last two months. It goes something like this:- you watch all the cookery programmes, get all the cookery books and still turn up at the supermarket without a clue of what you are going to eat for the following week. You walk up and down the aisles and grab stuff here and there and when you get back home you can’t remember what you were going to cook.

We have loads of cook books, one of which contained a list of things you should have in your store cupboard. We went and bought the lot, herbs, spices, sauces, pastas, etc so now we can look at a recipe and there will be only one or two things we need to buy for it.

Step 2 is to go through the cook books the day before we go shopping and work out what we need for the next four or five days, make a note of the recipe book and page, note the bits we need to get and now every day we are getting fresh, cooked to order food, we even have a herb garden growing in the cycle rack.

The amount of food we waste has dropped to almost zero, our shopping costs have been reduced and we are eating things that we may not have considered before. Last night was sweet and sour chicken, tonight was bacon and potatoes dauphinoise and tomorrow is puff pastry pizza or pumpkin, leek and potato bake.

Next time I write I hope we are in France, until then, Adieu.

 

2 thoughts on “Only a week to go (we hope)

  1. Ann and Eric McLaren

    I thought your menu would include boring things like Cock a Vin? or maybe your wine does not like being shown a cooking pot?
    Have a great trip. Ann and Eric

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