Summer Vacation 2021 – The Climb #913

Monday 23rd August 2021

I’m not sure when hiring cars became so bloomin’ expensive, but it meant that keeping the car much beyond Fightcamp wasn’t viable. But, I did want to get out of Swindon for the day and have a very compacted holiday, and so today was vacation day.

The idea behind today was to go to an area and hit up a lot of different places, compacting a week long holiday into a single day.

I love landscapes. One of the reasons I like goecaching is simply that wanderlust of seeing what is over the next hill. I’m playing Minecraft on a shared server right now and what’s struck me is how I’m the only one who has ventured off beyond their biome.

The Wiltshire biome (as it were) is all hills. I love those hills and I’ve had some of the greatest walks in Wiltshire… but I wanted a change of biome. So I decided when I was planning this that I wanted to go to the coast.

Originally the plan was to take C’s dog but we ended dropping her over at their mum’s last night as she would never have kept still the entire journey. However, it did mean in selecting places to go, I chose places that were relatively dog friendly. C is also not due their second jab until Thursday and so I also chose places out in the open.

My target was the Jurassic Coast in Dorset. It has some wonderful landscapes, it’s fairly open and there’s a bunch of places to choose from.

Our first target was Durdle Door. This is a beach with a huge rock arch in the sea. You have to climb down steep steps from the cliffs above, but even if that’s too energetic for you, there’s some great views up top. We chose to go down and sat on the beach for an hour. I’d stayed over and got C up early so that we arrived before the crowds and managed to get good parking. As we left, it was really starting to fill up.

C went for a paddle in the sea and I went crazy trying to get a load of thumbnails for The Climb.

The steps are uneven and some are large. As such I found the climb back up a bit of a struggle, although to be honest I think if I was fit I still would have been out of breath at the top. At least I got plenty of exercise today.

Next we went into Swanage, It was packed. We got a coffee in the world’s slowest coffee shop and then the world’s most expensive chips sat on the quayside. C went for a paddle in the sea again and I gurned for my phone camera some more.

Our final destination was Old Harry’s Rocks. I had wanted to do Corfe Castle but C was knackered from Durdle Door and so changed the direction on the sat nav as we drove out of Swanage. Unfortunately that took us to the wrong car park and C didn’t want to walk the extra distance. So instead we went down to the beach next to where we parked and walked along that. Whereas Durdle Door had been all shale, and Swanage was sand, so this beach was formed of little rock pools.

We spent a couple of hours there by which time, whilst it wasn’t particularly late, we were both knackered. So we made the choice to head back. I was sore from the walking and driving and C was tired. Probably just as well as by the time we got back, picked up the dog, and got some dinner, it was 10pm.

I end the day tired and grumpy but only because I did a lot today. Sure there was more we could have done but the idea was always to have too much to do and try and squeeze a week long vacation into a single day. I think we did that. We both got a change of scenery for a day, and got some exercise. I also have a bunch of new thumbnails for The Climb. At this rate I reckon I can use my surplus up whilst I’m trying to get back to full health and then have a reveal when I run out of my backlog. Of course, that depends on getting my desktop back, which I hope will be tomorrow.