That title is clever for two reasons: First, we went to the beach Camber at the weekend, which is next to Rye, and second, it's the title of a Queen song, and me and Ele are going to watch We Will Rock You up in the West End on Wednesday.
Back to the weekend... Summer has arrived! And we've been making the most of it. Friday evening we went to a thing called Abbeyfest and Merton Abbey Mills. This was basically a free event where you turn up with some chairs and watch a band and drink lots of beer. We all went (me, Ele, Jess, Joe, Chris, Arthur, Saff, Anise, and their neighbour, Maz, and her kids Hakeem and Tyrese). Was very good, the band were fantastic.
Saturday we attacked the lawn with the lawnmower, did some shopping and then went to Maz's for a BBQ in the evening and drank more beer.
Sunday we all (as above) went to the beach at Camber Sands. It took a long time to get there, as there was a 2 mile queue for the car park. Then it was a short hike along a sandy path, and up a sand-dune to get to the beach. If you'd have recorded us stumbling along with all of our beach paraphernalia and then sped it up it would have looked good accompanied by a Benny Hill soundtrack. Getting up the sand-dune was hard work because Joe and Anise couldn't walk up it.
When we reached the top though, we could see the beach, and it was HUGE! The sea was literally half a mile away - maybe even more - and the beach wasn't even that full, so we had loads of space. We setup and took Joe down to the sea. This took about thirty minutes, because it was so far away, and because Joe kept stopping to pick up sand from the wet bits. He was loving it. When we got to the sea, he had great fun standing in it (and falling over a couple of times). The tide was coming in really fast, though. We had gone in about ten feet or so (it was very flat and shallow - and very warm, too) and a few minutes later we turned around and the beach was now a good fifty or sixty feet away. We walked back to the shore and there were a bunch of guys who had dumped their stuff about twenty feet from the water's edge. I thought about mentioning to them that in about 2 minutes their stuff was going to be underwater, but decided the entertainment factor lay in not saying anything. Sure enough, the one guy who was remaining completely failed to notice the encroaching water until it was actually upon him. Very amusing.
By about 4pm the tide had reached up to where we had setup camp (I bought a beach-tent whilst we were there!) so we had to move back a bit, then shortly afterwards decided to leave. We never really saw Jess and Hakeem the whole day, they went off swimming for hours! All the kids had a fantastic time.
We packed up and struggled back to the car, and then disaster struck. Arthur had been topping up the coolant in his radiator, and accidentally knocked the radiator cap into the engine. We couldn't see it, or get to it, no matter what we tried. So we had to call Green Flag! They came within an hour and got it out. Whilst we were waiting everyone had dinner from the take-away stall in the car park and the kids watched a DVD in our car (that roof-mounted DVD player is the best thing in the world), apart from Joe & Anise who fell asleep within moments.
The drive back took ages as there was tons of traffic, so it was about 9:30pm before we got home. Then we still had to bath Joe who was covered in sand.
Exhausting weekend but good fun. And expensive. The car-park at Camber cost £7 for up to 6 hours, and drinks were 90p per can. And the place to buy them was miles away. Next time I'll buy a small fridge and a diesel generator and hire a man to carry them. It'll still work out cheaper.
