Scarborough, fair enough

Thursday was a good day. My kids' GCSE literature results were amazing and my actual kid got his second diving badge. To celebrate we went on an adventure: camping in Scarborough. Now, to many, nothing less than body-boarding the length of the Amazon counts as an actual adventure but my son and I see any unplanned trip as an adventure and this was our first two-handed camping expedition.




When we arrived I remembered that my kit does not class me as a professional camper. The average family appears to have a tent complete with fitted kitchen, double glazing and escalator, along with a selection of outbuildings housing their gym and fossil collections. My son and I had a tent, a plastic box with plates and a disposable barbecue. So we were pretty hardcore. We managed to get the tent up, our belongings arranged and dinner cooked in just two hours flat.





As you will observe it was a lovely evening and we relished the opportunity to eat al fresco and walk along the cliff path before clambering into our sleeping bags.

Of course, as is traditional, I awoke in the night to the sound of rain and it sheeted down for the next 24 hours. Undaunted, we went to Scarborough Castle for a heritage event based on pirates. There my son learnt lots of facts including that grog was water which had gone brackish and sailors used to pour rum in to sterilise it and drink it with clenched teeth to strain the scum out. They ate biscuit too which was flour, water and salt baked hard for two hours and dipped in ale to kill the weevils that infested it. Clearly, they would have made excellent modern day campers.







Finally, I gave in to the inevitable and we left the camping stove in the tent and went for pizza in town.







Overnight a miracle occurred. The rain stopped. This meant we packed the tent up in the sun and gave my son a chance to play cricket with some other kids on the site.