Doing three things at once

I got up early this morning as I am going to Bristol. But it would appear that I have a slight blog addiction problem which sees me doing this before I go. Hum.

Ah well, back to Felixstowe this weekend but instead of the usual whirl of boxes and packing we had visitors. My cousin brought her husband and two kids over to meet their Great-great Auntie Doll. Me and my sister were up at the crack of dawn (well, Penny was up that early but I was about before midday) cleaning the house from top to bottom as we had the estate agent coming over to look at it.

By lunchtime we were done and off to meet up with our (extended) family at a local historical site. We met up with Liz, her American husband, Mike, and two kids, Owen, who has a great sense of fun and adventure and his younger brother, Dylan, who is a bundle of smiles and freckles. We had arranged to meet them at Landguard Fort near Felixstowe Docks. The Fort has been there in one form or another for a few hundred years. When I was little you couldn't get into it but there were plenty of interesting ruins to climb over. There was even a tower though our parents would never let us go up there. When we were old enough to go there alone we found out why. It is the kind of place that people like to go to do things that they can't do in other places and they leave plenty of evidence behind.

This wasn't a problem on Saturday though as they have closed off all the bits that we used to explore for free but now you can pay and go inside. Most of the artifacts are in the museum next door. When I was a brownie I won a prize for cleaning a key to the Fort the best out of everyone, probably because I wouldn't let anyone else near the Brasso. For some reason, despite my imploring, no-one else seemed interested in hunting this key down, to be honest, I might not have recognised it myself.

Now Americans just do tourism better. While we Brits spurned the opportunity to spend a measly 20p to purchase a guide book, therefore leaving us wandering around saying 'I wonder what this hole was for...', Mike rented the audio equipment and now knows more about the Fort than is healthy. I will be expecting a full written report on my desk before the office closes today.

We ran around the fort and tried to find a place where the guns would actually be aimed at the sea rather than at other bits of the fort. Owen had a go at playing with the mortar shells, Mike consulted his audio guide book and the rest of us walked around and chatted.

Then it got close to tea-time so it was time to hit the amusement arcades down at the beach (Liz told me that there might be trouble if we didn't go, in fact, and let's just say that it wasn't the kids throwing the tantrums).

We changed some money into coppers and played on the penny drops. I snuck off to losing a couple of quid trying to get a Bagpuss out of the crane machines and Penny found money that other people had left behind in the machines, in true pikey fashion.

Dylan seemed to win the most with his devil-may-care attitude towards winning, the joy of putting money in the slot overwhelmed that when money actually came out to a certain extent. Eventually we had to pull Mike out of there kicking and screaming.

Stopping for chips and refusing the seaside rock,

we lapped up the seaside atomosphere until it was time to go back to Auntie Doll's and storytime for the boys. After dinner we went back to our house, put the boys down for the night and shared a bottle of wine.

Sunday was a less eventful day to some degree. The cat was petrified to wake up in a house full of strangers who seemed to be everywhere and did a bunk at the earliest opportunity. We went through mum's record collection ('What's a record?' asked the ever curious Owen) and saw our cousins off on their way back to Reading. We came back to Purfleet and that is it really. I would have put more photos on but I really have to go now.