Camping

I find camping holidays very relaxing.  The level of expectation, in all sorts of ways, is so much lower.  You're not expected to be glamorous, dress up or wear make up.  You're not required to be anywhere, at any time, for the most part.  You don't need to eat particular things at particular times.  As I say, it's relaxing.

French campsites, and I suspect others on the continent, are also fantastic for children.  So many activities available.  Plenty of other children around.  Safety and freedom.  Also, cheap wine. 

The last few trips we have been at large sites with lots of activities.  The not-so-small boy enjoys water slides and swimming pools and can spend hours entertaining himself on them, so that is a priority.  As he gets bigger, things like zip wires and ropes courses appeal more and more.  

This year's trip to Les Ormes worked out really well.  We went with Al Fresco, because we could use Tesco Clubcard vouchers in part payment (we've previously booked with Siblu on the same basis).  As we booked late, we ended up with a 3 bedroom mobile home.  It had a deck with a canopy and plenty of space.  This year's example was a bit more dated, a bit more tatty, than previous examples, but very comfortable.  We didn't have a wheelchair accessible mobile home (I can manage the two or three steps into a standard one and can walk the short distances inside).  Wheelchair adapted accommodation is available from Al Fresco, Siblu and Eurocamp at other sites. 

The campsite facilities were great - two pool areas, both with a range of slides, shallow and deeper areas and loungers.  Inevitably there were not enough loungers, but we discovered that if we headed down about four o'clock, people were starting to leave.   Since it was very warm and I had an injured elbow, I had a brief swim to cool off them enjoyed reading in the sun while the boy swam.  

We also enjoyed the pizza place onsite, the market on Tuesday evening, the "Pink Cabana" which served crepes, waffles and ice cream.  

The boy went down to the play ground and football area in the evenings and made a few friends.  He had a number of goes on the zipwire (€6 for two goes) and the ropes courses (€13 for two goes). 

   

Once again, despite my hopes, the kids' club provided by Al Fresco (with Eurocamp) didn't prove to be a success.  This year, the boy was the eldest in his age group and didn't particularly enjoy it.  I'm sure these are great if your kids do enjoy them and, now he's 12, I'm glad that the boy is old enough I get down time without them.  

We did a few side trips from Les Ormes, which I will hopefully get a chance to write about soon. 

Catch-up time

I have so many half-composed entries in my head from the summer - I am going to make a concerted effort to put some of them on here in the next couple of weeks, especially as I went and chatted to the lovely people at Blether FM, a local community radio station, this evening and promised to share this blog with them.  It needs to have some up to date content first!  So, I've all sorts of things on the way - more on France, some other things I've done over the summer and my first wheeled trip to the Helix and the Kelpies.

Right now, however, I need to think of a new nickname for the Small Scottish Boy.  He's had that nickname since he was a toddler, but at 139cm tall and in his last year of primary school,  he is now not so small.  This week he celebrated the massive milestone of his first proper rock concert - Foo Fighters at Murrayfield.

Until I come up with anything better, I think he'll need to be No-so-small Scottish Boy.

Culloden Battlefield Site

We're just back from 5 days in the Highlands, so I'll be posting a bit about that.

Yesterday, we went to visit the Culloden battlefield site.  It's somewhere I've always wanted to go but have been put off by the amount of walking.  This time, no walking needed!

I checked the accessibility information on the website before we went.  Like a number of sites, they have mobility scooters available, as well as wheelchairs (which were the typical heavyweight ones found at such sites - fine for someone being pushed).  I asked the very helpful member of staff at the desk about the accessibility and she said the paths should all be OK, so I decided to try it with my wheelchair.

First off was the indoor exhibition.  There are sloped areas inside the building, but they are fairly gentle and weren't difficult to negotiate.  The entrance and car park is below the level of the battlefield site, which has a positive effect when you're up on the battlefield itself, so the slopes seem justified and they're well done.

The displays are excellent and easy to see from wheelchair height.  There are interactive elements which the boy liked and an immersive cinema that puts you in the middle of the battle, which was a big hit with him.  At the end is a display of weapons from the battle and he spent about 20 minutes looking at them.  Thanks to some re-enactors from Canada and New York, he got to try a couple of them out.

And then it was out onto the battlefield itself, in our case armed only with GPS enabled audioguides.  

The paths are gravel, but well compacted and fairly smooth - even in April and at the end of a fairly wet week.  The site is not as flat as it first looks (using a wheelchair makes you reassess your definition of "flat"!)  But I made it the whole way round.  The boy gave me a couple of "boosts" (I think he's using Mario as an analogy here!) on some hills, but I didn't really need them.  There was one very small section, by the Well of the Dead, which felt a wee bit tippy, but I made it up that on my own so it can't have been too bad.  

 

It's a large site and we chose to walk the longer route round (but we didn't walk any of the side paths, which lead to memorial stones).  Google tells me it's a distance of about 2km and includes the areas that the National Trust for Scotland have been returning to moorland - as they would have been in 1746.  

This route takes you along both the Jacobite and Government Lines (marked by blue and red flags respectively) and past most of the main memorials, including the cairn shown at the top of the post.  It was clear there had been some fans of Outlander (which just arrived on TV here) visiting recently, as the Fraser memorial was the only one with wee stones on the top, though some others had flowers (we visited the day after the anniversary of the battle).

 

It was by the cairn that I hit the only real problem with access - a section of path that had been resurfaced mere minutes before (there was a tractor there when we started our walk) and hadn't had enough footfall to compact it.  Luckily, the surround grass had been compacted so I could wheel across it instead.  I did get a bit stuck first, though - you can see my attempts to get across on just back wheels before I gave up! 

The last section took us past the Well of the Dead and the audio guide didn't satisfy the boy's curiosity about it.  Not sure I did either.  

Finally, it was time to bribe the boy so I could get a picture with me in it - this is outside Leanach Cottage, which is the only building on the site which dates from before the battle (Culloden House itself is about 3km away). 

All in all we had a great visit and I was really impressed at how they have managed to make an outdoor, historic site accessible.  A couple of bits would have been easier with something like a Freewheel (particularly the soft sand by the cairn as it was my front wheels that got stuck.  I plan to buy a Freewheel when I have some spare money, but it wasn't essential at Culloden.  

London - part 1 - Legoland

This post got stuck in draft, so I am posting it now - slightly too late!  I suspect part 2 won't ever get written!

Our second summer holiday of the year (the first being a bargain week in Corfu in July) was a short visit to London in August with one of my best friends, her husband and their three kids.  Their son is just a few weeks younger than the small Scottish boy, although they'd not seen each other since they were three years old as my friend lives in Ireland.  We shared a 3 bedroom apartment near the centre of London and whilst the apartment was lovely, I have learnt a lesson - just because a place says it has a lift, don't assume there's not a dozen steep steps before you get to the lift!

I was a bit nervous about the travelling around in London, because my memories of it (I lived there in late 90s) was of a place which was not at all disabled friendly.  When I checked things out I was surprised to find that there was no lift access to far more tube stations than had been the case - including all the platforms at Kings Cross, which was a good start since that was near where we were staying.  This meant I was able to get the tube in from Heathrow (we flew down as the boy had a hospital appointment - nothing serious - that day).  The nice man from BAA collected me at the plane door in a nifty wheelchair which had room for our carry-on case, which saved the boy from having to pull it and escorted me all the way onto the tube train itself.

Our first stop was Legoland.  I'd been once before - in 1991 and in Denmark - and the rest were newbies. All the kids were big Lego fans though!

First off.  Do not think it will be "easy enough" to get to Legoland from central London.  It took ages.  Stay near the park.  If you are travelling from outside southern or central England and don't have a car, this is easier said than done.  There's the park hotel, but that was full when we booked.  Much scouring of websites failed to find anywhere close and accessible by public transport, but we got to Slough and discovered there is a Holiday Inn by the station.

Anyway, we survived our public transport journey and hit the park.  It seems much more real than Disney, and that's a big plus for me.  As I described it to my friend's husband: "you see that hedge there, it's just an ordinary, slightly scrappy looking hedge.  At Disney, it would be perfectly manicured and there would be a fountain making it look like a single drop of water was bouncing along the top of it".   It's also better value.  Entrance fees were reasonable (as a group of 7 we paid about £22 each) and the food was as well.  After 4pm, there was an all you could eat buffet deal for I think £20 per adult.  Since we got one kid free for each adult, we ended up paying £10 a head.  For £6 you could buy a refillable drink bottle, with free refills all day long, so we shared a couple of those.

The problem is that it's also really not designed with mobility in mind.  It's built on a steep hill.  Most of the attractions are at the bottom and there is a funicular railway down the hill, but it's still far from level.  As a result I stuck with my crutches, which made me tired and sore by the end of the day.  It would be good if they could hire out scooters.  They do have a priority entry system for disabled people, but as a group of 7 there were too many of us to use it.  I could only bring 3 people with me and we had 4 kids with us.  Can you imagine the fights! What the staff were happy with, however, was for the rest of the group to queue and for me to join them at the front.  It meant I still waited just as long, but could sit down while doing so.

Our first day was damp.  The couple of times rain threatened we were able to duck into indoor rides so no one got drenched.  Like Disney, each area is themed - Lego City, Lego Castles, Lego Pirates, Vikings.  The rides are a great mix of tamer ones for little kids and wilder ones for older kids, for example in the Castle section were three rollercoasters - each suitable for different age groups.  The youngest member of our group (4 year old M) went on all of them.  Lego theme is not over powering.  Our second day turned out to be the start of a heatwave (which left me wishing we were staying longer).  The kids accidentally discovered the splash pad, which meant an hours wasted while they ran about in their knickers getting soaked.  Then we dashed around catching up on the rides we had missed the day before - ending up with the wet rides.  I was thoroughly teased for insisting on wearing my raincoat. We may have even forgotten to feed the children!


The small Scottish boy is not, it turns out, a big thrillseeker, but still enjoyed most of the rides.  Since the park is aimed at 4-12 year olds, nothing was too hard on my back, except perhaps the pirate ship.   He loved panning for gold (well, fool's gold) and some of the tamer rides, but his absolute favourite was the driving school.  I think I am still disappointed that I was too old for that when I was at Legoland in 1991.  My favourite was Miniland, of course.  Isn't it everyone's?

France

So, we're not long back from France, which should give me material for several posts I guess.

Our holiday this year was shared with a friend and her son and partner. The first weekend was a bit hectic. Friday, 25th June was the last day of school for L and also the day of the Bo'ness Fair. L had been dropped at school at 9am, so a frantic couple of hours were spent by me, packing the car and doing the last tidying jobs, because to make it more complicated, a new heating system and new bathroom were being installed while we were gone.

At 11, I headed along to the Town Hall for the official ceremony, where the new Fair Queen was crowned and various displays took place. Then back along the road for an hour's uncomfortable wait for the parade. L's school nominated the Queen this year so his school led the parade and as the youngest boy in Primary 1, he led his school, just after the flag bearers. Here he is, enjoying a pre-parade gingerbread man, with his teacher.

Once I'd collected him from school at the end of the parade, we hit the road, making it to Oxford in 7 hours, pretty much exactly. The reason for our rush was that the following day we had tickets for They Might Be Giants, who were doing a kids' show at the Royal Festival Hall. We drove into London, the Southbank Centre being nice enough to provide free parking to disabled badge holders attending concerts (but beware - in the above ground carpark there are no actual disabled spaces - Hayward Gallery carpark might be better).

Central London driving is busy, sure, but I never find it as bad as people think. That may be the Auckland trained driver in me coming out! Although there is no congestion charge on a Saturday anyway, cars with a disabled exempt tax disc are exempt from it at all times.

The concert was great, the venue also, but I have a wee gripe in that, although I'd asked if there were time to go to the loo before the show and been told there was, we were told we'd have to go to the back of the hall and climb down the stairs to get back in - luckily someone came out then and I just went in anyway. Oh and there are *NOT ENOUGH LIFTS* - especially when half the crowd have buggies!

Sunday morning we got up at "OMG o'clock" to get an 8:15 ferry from Portsmouth. I do like Brittany Ferries and last year's trip had taught me the lesson of specifying we needed access to the lift (which got us a special sticker and we had to put hazards on so the loaders spotted it) and also a cabin nearer the centre of the boat. Last year, we were stuck at the farthest edge of the ship, a long walk to and from the cabin and that was an overnight crossing!

The rest of Sunday was a longish (about 6 hours) drive down the west of France to our first stop, Les Charmettes a campsite a wee bit south of La Rochelle. More of which, later...