Country: England
Distance travelled:
Weather: cool but sunny

Since we had no real target for today apart from a general inclination to head toward the East coast, we pottered around this morning. We had to finish unpacking ourselves after our narrow boat trip and there seems to always be some reason to move stuff around and try to get things more organized. Eventually Mark decided we should head off to a camper store where we may be able to buy a new cassette for our Thetford toilet since our current loo seems to be suffering from signs of old age.

As we motored along the highway toward Weeley, we passed an absolutely huge car boot sale. It looked like it was starting to finish up but we decided to have a look anyway. Since we were obviously arriving so close to closing time, there was no one to charge us an entry fee and we had no trouble finding a park for the van. There wasn’t much left to see but we did find a bakery stall so we grabbed some lovely looking bread rolls and a piece of apple slice to have for dessert tonight. We had finally found some thickened cream suitable for scones which will go just as well with the apple slice.

From there we continued to the camper shop that had been our initial target. It was quite a comprehensive shop with almost anything one could desire in the way of accessories and quite a few thing that seemed a little extreme to us. We checked out the cost of both the Thetford toilet cassettes and the Cadac barbecues but both can be found online for a better price. In the end we bought a mat that will be great for cleaning shoes before we get in the van, a reel for the EHU cable and a new hiking stick for me.

It was past 3pm by now, so we headed on to the beachside resort of Frinton-on-Sea for a very late lunch. It was here that we discovered that the rolls we had bought had probably been sitting out all day and were not quite as fresh as they looked. We were too hungry to care by then, luckily. An after lunch stroll along the promenade, showed us another type of beach resort with beach huts eave to eave and concrete steps down to a smidgen of sand for many kilometers along the beach. Although it was a sunny day, I still felt it was far too cold to be in the water but apparently quite a few others disagreed.

We could see though the haze over the ocean toward the West what appeared to be another coastline and a large number of wind turbines. Was this France in the far distance? I know the channel is quite narrow at Dover but can one really see the continent from there? Once we returned to the van, I started up Google Earth to check our location and found that it was definitely not France, if anything it was more likely to be Belgium. Actually, after a while, we came to the conclusion it was the other side of the bay we were on and the wind turbines where part of the London Array, a bank of 175 turbines being built out in the ocean. We got out our trusty binoculars and had a good look but couldn’t see much detail through the haze.

An entry error in the GPS had us quite a ways off course before we rectified it but we eventually arrived at Flatford, a National Trust site with a history of association with the artist John Constable and the location where he painted his famous work The Hay Wain. We strolled around in the late afternoon admiring the scenery, the bridge over the River Stour and a nearby lock which had a tilting weir, something we hadn’t come across on the Oxford canal. I have developed quite a fascination with locks and spent some time trying to understand its workings before resorting to Wikipedia.

When we returned to the van, it was to find a second motorhome had arrived. A family with young children soon returned from their own explorations and we all settled in for the night.