The Isle of Wight

We spent last weekend with Dean and Leanne, at Nettlecombe Farm down on the Isle of Wight. It was such an easy-going, cruisy weekend – a perfect little getaway from London!

The farm was surrounded by walking trails, as well as lots of open fields for us to lie in, basking in the glorious English sunshine. Unfortunately, our “glorious sunshine” was replaced by extreme winds, the likes of which I have never seen before, and dark, rain-threatening clouds! Still, on the upside, it never actually rained while we were there, so it was only an idle threat.

Since we were travelling for Kristy’s birthday on Friday night, we instead celebrated with a Saturday lunch at The Hambrough – a Michelin starred pub in a town called Vetenor. The meal was spectacular – especially the desserts! Kristy’s lemon tart with vanilla yoghurt sorbet was particularly good!

We also spent a number of hours geocaching, which turns out to be a terrific activity! Admittedly, the iPhone isn’t the greatest GPS unit in the world, but it did manage to help us find no less than three caches! Not bad for our first try! But more on that later…

On Sunday, we trolleyed out to The Needles, which we had thought was simply a lovely vantage point to see a fairly spectacular cliff formation.

As it turns out, it’s actually a little amusement park, which charges you four pounds for the privilege of using their car park. I can’t adequately describe how terribly sad the little park is – for a start, there were more staff than there were customers, and this felt uncomfortably apparent as we walked around. Also, it was like all of the rides had gone through that machine that Rick Moranis invents in “Honey, I shrunk the kids”, because they all seemed comically small.

Worst of all, they had a merry-go-round that was so unappealing, even Kristy – who is fanatical about her carousels – wouldn’t go near. I told her that it may be the only opportunity that she’d ever have to ride Ben, and yet she still declined!

Still, it didn’t do much to dampen our Isle of Wight experience. Sure, blazing sunshine and warmer weather would have been better, but we certainly made the most of what we had, and it was great to spend the weekend with Dean and Leanne! And, that’s one more place we can tick off our “places to visit in England” list. Mission successful!