Rondeau on a Monday

Sunday night with the hound? Not good, not good at all.

I was awake at 5am, reading at 6am and feeding the little darling at 7am. Not exactly my ideal holiday sleeping regime but I guess it goes with the territory. The dog crate is too big to go in the trailer comfortably, and even if I could get her bony little butt inside the crate, she’s long since considered it an instrument of torture and would surely have created enough havoc for me to let her out anyway. Bed sharing it must be, then.

Oh, and we had a bit of rain in the night. It might have been a lot of rain, I don’t know, but I was determined to get some small amounts of sleep, so I did my best to ignore the sound of droplets on the trailer’s skin. It was still hot, too, although not as hot as it had been, so we left all the windows open as far as we dare when we knew it would rain. With the combination of open windows, the trailer’s extractor fans and the nice chrome tabletop fan we use to blow the air around, the temperature inside wasn’t too bad thankfully. Yes, we have air conditioning but, as it does a good impression of the Concorde taking off, we chose not use it. Strangely, I noticed that the chrome fan wasn’t running when I woke at 5am. I assumed the good Mrs. M had turned it off on one of her nocturnal forays, but the notion that the power was off in the trailer did cross my sleep-deprived mind. A trip to the loo unfortunately solidified that notion; no power.

We’ve been to this park many times and never lost power and, being of good analytical mind, I thought I’d first check the power supply pillar at the edge of the site, just in case our little palace on wheels was playing tricks on us. There was no little light on the connector plug, and the pillar’s fuses were set to On, so it could only be a park-wide outage, and that is what it proved to be. Indeed, as I walked the hound around the site after her breakfast, no lights were visible and there were a few very sad looking campers wandering about muttering “Is your power out, too?”

So, we sat in all morning while the rain cleared up, reading and mooching about on our phones, speculating as to when the power might come back. It’s no biggie for us really, because we do have battery power, but we felt that during the day that we could do without electricity and had an enforced time out. I’m not sure the fridge and freezer were not too happy about the situation, but we haven’t died from food poisoning yet so it can’t have been that bad. We later found out that the previous night’s storm had brought a tree down, along with an inconveniently sited power line, and it had taken all morning to get things back up and running. The odd thing was that I had been reading about the need, or otherwise, of having a generator when camping. Never need it, I thought. Oh, the irony.

On Monday afternoon we drove out to Ridgetown, that Mecca of fine living. Our first stop was Pinnell’s Bakery for some sausage rolls and a Custard Slice, our second stop was Little Britain (British Imports) for Britain’s finest snack food. I was minding the hound outside while the good Mrs. M made the transactions inside when I was accosted by a fairly well-dressed woman asking first about the dog, then asking if I was Mark. She wanted the Mark who was running Little Britain, not the Steve who wasn’t, but she picked up on my accent, put two and two together to make sixty-three and thought I was he. I was still deep in conversation when the DW appeared and I wondered what she though of me chatting with strange women in the street. Being a sensible cove, her two and two made four and she thought “dog”.

After lunch, all three of use spent a happy few hours catching up on the previous night’s lost sleep, such is our level of non-stop action when we camp.

Post-supper (home made vegan gumbo) Monday evening was film night and I set the TV and Blu-ray player up to watch Inception. I’m not so sure what the movie was about but it had a lot of guns and bombs and things and was very noisy, especially as we were feeding the sound through the excellent Bose speaker. Pish to the neighbours. The film may have been easier to follow had I not fallen asleep through long sections of  it, but I guess that being holiday is a sort of semi-excuse.
​
The temperature had fallen significantly during the day, and we went to bed feeling much happier. Well, I say happier, but I had to go to work on Tuesday and of course the Greyhound who gets bigger at night was looking longingly at our bed…
​