Where's Erica? She's on a small (14-pitch) campsite on a Christmas Tree farm (Santa's Field) near Chadwick End (postal address Solihull, but it doesn't look that close on the map), at a cost of £15. Electricity is available for an extra £5.
Weather: hot and humid with a weather warning for thunderstorms and lots of bubbly clouds developing as the afternoon has gone on.
I joined the National Trust this week, having last been a member some 20 years ago, and in keeping with that previous experience, I see it as a challenge to get our money's worth as quickly as possible. I thus started planning this trip, with three properties potentially on the agenda. Admittedly, the week running up to August bank holiday isn't the most obvious time for a retired couple with no children to entertain to go away, but we were fed up of being at home, and surely Coventry and the surrounding area isn't an obvious holiday destination that would be rammed with an excess of traffic on small roads and overflowing campsites. After hours of trying to come up with a sensible plan of where to go, where to stay and which vehicle to use, my original intention for a 5-night trip became a flexible 'somewhere between 1 and 5 nights' plan (we were going to be so close to home that it made more sense to commute to the places I wanted to visit than to pay for expensive campsites or accommodation).
Today, via a quick detour via Edgbaston where I had an appointment (it's over a decade since I last drove in Birmingham; I'll quite happily go another decade before doing so again. These days there's the added stress of not taking a wrong turn and accidentally straying into the Clean Air Zone), we headed over to the National Trust's Packwood House, where a few hours were spent wandering around house and gardens.
After refreshments in the cafe (which wasn't exactly 'refreshing' as it was so hot in there), and a turn around the lake (where rain drops were seen on the water, but only three hit us), we headed on over to the campsite, on a Christmas tree farm, where we settled Erica onto a hard-standing no-electric pitch (thanks to having a functioning solar panel, we were confident that we could run Erica's fridge without hook-up*) and contemplated that it looked like the forecast thunderstorms could arrive at any minute.
You might say that it's because of the location that there were only five units spread amongst the 14 pitches on what would be perceived as such a busy week for accommodation, but it's in keeping with our experience even in more obvious holiday destinations: we've never struggled to book the Church House in Torver (Lakes) on a day's notice in late July, and when we found the small campsite by Milnthorpe to be empty the same week a few years ago, the owner explained that their main customer base is retired people, who perceive that the school holidays are busy, so they stay away, but in reality most families overlook little Certified Location sites and flock to commercial sites.
(*Erica's fridge was an emergency purchase in June 2025 when the temperature for a 24-hour race I was taking part in was forecast to be in the 30s. We've now used that fridge quite a few times but it was only as the evening drew on on this trip that we realised that we'd never slept in Erica whilst the fridge was plugged in. Because Erica wasn't designed with a fridge, it doesn't have a dedicated spot, so it travels on the floor (by accident, not design, the space in front of the toilet is the perfect size to hold it in place whilst driving), and then lives on the kitchen work surface when we're parked up. The problem with it being out in the open, on what is effectively a sounding board, is that it's noise when the compressor springs into life, in such a small space, is too loud not to risk disturbing sleep. Not having an immediate solution, we simply turned it off overnight.)
Photos in a slightly random order:
No comments:
Post a Comment