Remember the series of adventure stories by Enid Blyton? The Island of Adventure, the Sea of Adventure, the Castle of Adventure ... How, when the children got measles or 'flu, they'd all be packed off to some distant relative at the seaside to recuperate? And inevitably, it would be full of danger, with nary an adult in sight. Ah, those were the days!
Sometimes, only the sea will do. And so we went west, all of us, for a weekend. We stayed in a prettily coloured house looking out onto the strand ...
Round by the harbour, we trod the boards of the weathered pier stretching out into the estuary ...
Underneath it hung a bell, cleverly positioned, whose metal tongue clappered in warning across the bay, as the water rose and the tide came in ...
The canoes, later in the day, provided much entertainment as the youngsters practised flipping under the water and righting themselves ...
I couldn't resist hunkering down to look at the textures up close ...
Himself let me snap him after a long clifftop climb ...
And I returned the favour at the start of an inland wooded trek ...
And, of course, there were reflective walks along the wet sands as dusk settled across the shore ...
It was our own kind of adventure; we have recuperated a little, laughed a little, and had a chance to knit ourselves back together a little. Next adventure? Choosing a design for the scrapbook pages. You can see we live really dangerously up here!
