Touring Norfolk in a motorhome

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Day 14: moving across to Gresham and Church Down Farm

Route: B1155 – A149 to Sheringham (stop off at Tesco’s) – minor road to  

Distance: approx. 33 miles

Expenditure: Tesco’s food shop for next few days £35

Campsite: CAMC Church Down Farm Cottages, Gresham CL site

 

 

“You either get Norfolk, with its wild roughness and uncultivated oddities, or you don’t. It’s not all soft and lovely. It doesn’t ask to be loved”

                                                           Stephen Fry

 

By 0900 we are in the National Trust carpark at Morston waiting for people to arrive at the ‘Temple Boats’ minivan. We are booked on the 1030 tour out to the end of Blakeney spit to see the common and grey seal colonies. There are three boat operators in the Blakeney/Morston quay areas – Temple Boats, Beans Boats and Ptarmigan Boats and we recommend you book in advance via their individual websites.

The weather has broken and the rain is torrential. The temperature has dropped from 27C a few days ago to a miserable 12C today and the winds, from the north East, are blowing a steady 22mph with gusts to 35mph. Puddles are forming in the gravel car park as the rain lashes the one side of Bryony and its beginning to look like a lake.

We duly turn up at the minivan and the young lady looks surprised, describing us as ‘hard core’. The other party of 7 turn up as well, so the trip is a goer! Finally, her grandad arrives, a real Norfolk man, with a wonderful regional accent and weathered brown face and watchful eyes. This is a man who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. We troop down to the forty-foot-long open boat. He gets a small canvas/acrylic windowed cuddy for shelter. The rest of us are clearly just going to get wet; very, very wet!

His daughter, acting as crew today, is cheerful but warns us that if we are expecting to see a thousand seals it won’t be happening. Something has happened this season and they are only seeing between 8 and 30 odd seals up on the beaches. No one seems to be able to account for the change in behaviour; but all the local fishermen are reporting the seals out at sea and not on the beaches. In the past there have been thousands lying on the sands.

We glide out, the diesel engine chugging away with a reassuringly regular beat. Out past little wooden rickety pontoons with a vast array of small boats moored bow first, we watch Arctic Terns following the boat, swooping and soaring before suddenly diving vertically to grab a poor sand eel.

Out past an old traditional Norfolk barge, ‘The Juno’ and a little Dutch sail boat with large leeboards, the winds pick up, the clouds close and the drizzle thickens. Mag and I are in full waterproofs. The other family have umbrellas and flip-flops!

At the spit point, the huge colonies of arctic and small terns are bunkered down in the shingle dips huddling between clumps of samphire and other salt/shingle marsh plants. It is nesting season and rats and stoats are having a field day as eggs hatch. The seals aren’t where they should be and the Skipper warns us, he is going to head around the point where it will get breezy, wet and a little lumpy.

https://youtu.be/bsCPjXtlr0w

A kilometre further down the outer point we finally find thirty seals on the beach and around ten or so in the water, heads bobbing up to scrutinise us intently. The water shallows very rapidly here and the skipper gets us as close in as he can, skilfully positioning and holding the boat against various swirling currents and contrary waves. His Grandfather taught his dad; his dad taught him and he….had five daughters instead although some of the son in laws are learning the craft.

After a few minutes, he can no longer hold position and so we head back in. There back on the inside of the spit end bend, we find a large seal has hauled out onto the sand and the boat skirts down the beach waterline a few metres away. A good close final encounter.

I enjoyed the trip immensely but then I am a small open boat sailor. The skipper’s daughter was charming, knowledgeable and a good conversationalist and totally impervious to the weather. I can’t vouch for anyone else’s enjoyment!!

The car park is now a reservoir and water is lapping the front tyres of Bryony. We are absolutely drenched. Sodden. The rain has penetrated our waterproofs, our duvet jackets and our fleece layers. (I’m thinking of sending a strongly worded email to Mountain Equipment – who designs a top of the range mountain waterproof with non-waterproof pockets for God’s sake? I mean who??). Hats and gloves are sodden, as is footwear.  Bryony is about to become a huge drying area this afternoon. We will extend out the bed platforms, belt the heating up to 20C+, and hang various clothing items in front of the blown air outlets. If we crack open roof skylights it should stop condensation building up and we shouldn’t feel like we are in a sauna!

Well, that’s the theory!

 

We pitch up at 2pm at the new campsite at Churchdown Cottages in Gresham. It is a fully serviced pitch and we are warm and toastie and things are drying nicely. A caravan pitches up in the next pitch and insists we unplug our EHU – they don’t have one and pitch four has two sockets. They could of course just plug their cable into pitch four, its long enough, but they are flustered and tired (which we so understand) and so we agree to move ours. This knocks out our heating for some unfathomable reason and for several hours after, we have error codes left right and centre on the Truma panel. We have to disconnect, switch everything off and reboot everything several times before finally getting heating back at 7pm.

I have developed a love-hate relationship with the Truma and Harmony panels (Maggie calls it the Trauma panel). Whilst the heating is playing up – the harmony panel is showing the waste tank 75% full; which is baffling given we emptied it this morning before leaving the other site. And next moment, it is registering 0%. We haven’t used any water to fill it up. We conclude that it is a faulty sensor. I peer below the tank to see that the sensors are attached to the tank exterior and are basically connected to each other with plastic connectors wrapped in tape. Not exactly waterproof are they!! I’m guessing some water spray off the wet roads has found its way into the connectors. I leave it alone and sure enough as the rain stops and the sun comes out, the water evaporates and the sensors resume their normal temperamental functioning!

If you are an Autosleepers Broadway owner, then this will all be familiar to you – a quirky system which takes a bit of getting used to.

 

Post script: damp towels and/or waterproofs

When everything gets dampish….well sodden actually in the experience outlined above………

Let’s talk drying waterproofs in a motorhome and for that matter damp towels as well. We have put up hooks in our shower for such occasions. Steve modelled it on a ‘wet locker’ that you have on boats for wet foulies. Wet waterproofs and over trousers are hung up in the shower area so they can drip until we get back to base.

We then put on the hot air blower in the bathroom to aid the drying process. We carry a stand-up drying rack and this is left in the bathroom over the hot air vent. (All this does necessitate emptying the shower tray area in which Steve stores his telescope and the accessories that go with it). 

Tactic B is we draw out one of the bed frames and this acts as a drying rack because it is directly above three of the hot air ducts, in the main habitation area. The trick is not to block the vents and to allow the heat to rise and get caught under the drying items. Of course, it can create a sauna effect so we also open up one of the skylights a little which allows some of the air to escape. To date it seems to have worked and we haven’t had any condensation problems so far. It does restrict movement around the habitation unit though.

These are, of course, the tactics for damp days. For general laundry on warmer days, things get hung out on either the stand-up drying rack or on a clothes line slung between the cab mirror and a convenient tree or fence post.

We do need to think through how we do laundry on longer trips. If we stay on top of it frequently i.e. little and often then drying a few things on the rack shouldn’t be a problem. Our mistake on this trip was to wash too many things and then they took too long to dry; not good when the weather is changeable from day to day.  Another alternative is to actually factor into our planning a regular stop every other week or two where there is access to a laundrette, whether it be at a site or in a local town we pass through.  This would be a better approach for things like towels, bed linen and heavier items which take longer to dry.