New Forest Camping trip part 1

This camping trip came about from a friend at church, Joy, who said we should all get together and go camping.  Fortunately it didn't remain as just a good idea, because she found the camping place, found available dates, and started inviting families to join.  We booked too, and it was so very reasonable to book a ready made tent, so we didn't have the bother of putting up a tent for just the long weekend.  It seems like she chose a really good week as the weekend before had been quite a lot colder, and by the Friday the weather was hot and glorious.

I had low expectations for the ready made tents, I thought we would be squashed in, but they were brand new and really spacious and organized inside.  The beds were extremely comfortable too.

The blue skies were so lovely.

It was nice to still be able to prepare nice healthy meals.

We arrived sooner than almost everyone, the one perk of not having the kids in school ;-)

We all got to bed early on the first night, I didn't want to feel tired on the first full day of holiday the next day, and we had also planned to leave really early to make the Poole parkrun which was by the sea.

All the bookworms reading while we got ready the next morning.  What a blessing to have all the UK cousins on holiday with us too.

Sweet Julia and Ciara

Unfortunately I didn't get pictures of us all at the Poole parkrun but snapped these just before we left.  It is amazing how lovely some of these 5km parkruns are.  This one started at a clubhouse and then came down to this boating lake, we ran 2 laps around the boat lake and back up to the clubhouse to finish.

This is a great photo of Grant running with Liz Yelling, olympic marathon runner - this is her local parkrun.

Going back up to the clubhouse.

Another view of the lake.

All the Russells then headed to the beach, and we headed back to the campsite.