Ending Up Anywhere

Cooking at sunset It's now the end of September and probably nearing the end of comfortable tent camping for this year. The weather forecast was good for this weekend and so we decided to choose a Certified Location from the Camping and Caravanning Club which we've been members of for a week! We chose Heathy Roods Farm in the Peak District and it was absolutely stunning. The small site is quite remote, up on top of a hill with beautiful views all around. We arrived at 6.45pm and had about another hour of light to pitch the tent and make a start on preparing dinner. There are two level fields to this site and I think the larger one has the best views. It sits next to a sloping field that had just been harvested for hay and the bails sat dotted around. The larger field has a corner sectioned off for Duke of Edinburgh groups and one such group was there on our first night. They didn't make too much noise and were quiet by at least 10pm until they packed up about 8am

Our herb and spice cupboard We like to cook, and we like to cook fresh food properly. There'll be no difference between how we cook at home and how we cook when camping, and so the challenge we've set ourselves it to ensure we have an all-encompassing camp store cupboard. The toughest thing to crack has been how to store herbs and spices. Supermarket bought herbs and spices come in glass jars which will add unnecessary weight to our load and clink around until we wish we could jettison the lot. Nowhere seems to produce anything for herb and spice storage that's aimed at the travelling chef. But I've found the perfect thing. A plastic tray holding eight plastic pots. It's designed for storing and freezing baby meals but it's absolutely perfect for our needs. Plus it was a bargain too! I bought two so we can carry 16 herbs and spices, and one tray stacks nicely on top of the other. They're £2.50 from Asda.

An early morning coffee Now we know we're getting a campervan, each weekend without it is almost unbearable. This weekend the weather forecast predicted gloriously warm days and so we decided to get the tent out. We gathered up some of our new campervan purchases including our wood stoves, threw it all in the back of the car and set off for Wales, to a campsite I'm hoping we'll visit regularly. Cwmdu in the Black Mountains is a site we've visited several times before and we like it for it's quiet and simple feel. It's not open during the winter though, and since we're expecting delivery of the campervan in December we'll not be able to make our first overnight stay there. It took longer to get there than we'd planned on and we ended up setting up the tent in the dark. This was made a little easier thanks to the wind-up LED lamp I was given for my birthday - 23 LEDs combine to create an almost floodlit area. With the tent pitched by 9pm w