I took my dog Moo camping with me for the first time. We stayed at Evergreen Woods Farm in East Grinstead. It is an aptly named venue with well spaced pitches and an actual woodland you can (and I did) get lost in.
At my request they were kind enough to reserve me the furthest pitch from other people as possible and there actually transpired to be only a family of 3 of them that day anyway.
True to form, I woke up on the day of the camp to torrential rain which fortuitously alleviated by the time I arrived and set up my pitch. I experimented with setting up my tarp as a porch (Yay for shelter, Boo for view) shared my lunch of canned fish with Moo, then constructed a fire which flared successfully for about 3 minutes before I got overly ambitious with a chunk of wood that served to immediately extinguish it. I would like to say I will learn from this, but clearly I didn't the last time, nor the time before the last time (Penultimate? Does Penultimate work when it is currently the time before the last time but not likely to be the definitive time before the very last time...? Hmm. Language is tricky...)
Anyhoo, it got dark and - having failed to replicate something teeny-brained prehistoric monkey-men mastered 1.5 million years ago - we went to bed. Moo got very cold in the night. She moved onto my thermarest and into my sleeping bag. Which consequently meant one third of me moved out.
The next morning I awoke one third hypothermic at 04:00 to rain. Siri told me it should stop by 06:00, and when it didn't by 07:30 I simply resigned myself to getting wet. I had forgotten to bring coffee and this needed to be rectified as a matter of urgency, pissy weather or not.
At the local premier corner shop - a mere one mile away but impossible to safely traverse on foot due to unpedestrianised roads - I bought coffee, sugar and a six-pack of Holstein Pils since it would be rude not to, then pootled back to the camp where I discovered that it was the trees that were raining, not the sky. The woodland area still dripped a steady stream of water from its leaves onto the soggy terrain below, while the field pitches up the hill were downright sunny.
I also discovered that the floor of my tent was saturated, having set up pitch in what transpired to become a puddle in the overnight rain. An exasperated hour was spent emptying, cleaning and airing the tent, afterwhich the lure of being someplace else doing something else became too strong to resist and I pootled (should 'pootling' indicate a breathless, sweaty, heart-poundingly chest-achey lumber) uphill to claim one of the empty sunny field pitches as my own, where I cracked on with my kindle Deal of the Day book - (Maggie Fielding did it!) - and beer to the tune of grasshoppers, birds and a distant cockerel that literally has not let up for a single full minute since I arrived.
Somewhere along the line I came to the conclusion that the notion of setting my tent up all over again, only to have to clean and dry it AGAIN when I take it down tomorrow in no way appealed to me, and I resolved to breaking camp and heading home later that evening. A choice well made, it turned out, as a mass migration of campers began to stream into the pitches as I begin to empty mine. I am glad I got to experience the woodland while it was filled with birdsong rather than children.
I encounter the owners in their jeep and trailer on my way back up the track to my car, and they are kind enough to offer to transport the rest of my kit back up to my car. Moo and I got to ride in the back of the trailer.
Evergreen Woods Farm is an excellent camp site for those who are comfortable to go rustic. It has two well maintained unisex compost toilets (a downright luxury for those of us who are perfectly comfortable crapping in a hole) transport from the carpark to the pitches and a huge bottle of water included in the price. Every pitch has a firepit but firewood costs extra (at time of writing - £5.50) There is no farm shop, but there is a premier corner shop a mile up the hill (turn right when you leave the camp and straight on til morning... well, til you see a premier corner shop about a mile up the road)
The workers are super friendly and practically insist upon helping you, even when they are clearly flat out with other errands.
But the BEST thing about this camp are the trees. So many campsites describe themselves as being a woodland camp, based upon the fact they have a minimum of four trees, and a tree on each side of the camp might be considered legally as 'surrounding'. This actually is a woodland. Many of the pitches actually are surrounded by trees. There is also a large pond. Its pretty. You get bitten by many things if you sit next to it. Don't.
At £29 for 2 nights including the £2 a night surcharge for bringing a bedsheet-stealing pooch, it's more expensive than I can yet get my head around for camping, but it actually appears to be around average these days.
No comments:
Post a Comment