Recently, our trusty hound has been not very keen to go on his usual walks, apparently largely out of boredom. I admit that due to lack of time, he has had to put up with the same two walks, day in, day out, for a while now, but they're not THAT bad. Honestly. His boredom at seeing the same old grass every day is expressed by getting slower and slower and looking rather cheesed-off. Anxious to verify that boredom was indeed reason, I tried taking him on some different walks, further afield than usual, and suddenly he was his usual rocket dog self again. Today was "a different walk day" and this time the rest of the family had to come too.
We trekked off to find the remains of RAF Warmwell, Dorset's only RAF fighter base during the Battle of Britain (according to Wikipedia). Most of the airfield is now either the village of Crossways - the village hall there was previously the airbase's gymnasium and cinema, for instance - or gravel pits. However, there are still some ruins in the woodland on the edge of the gravel pits, which I thought the children might enjoy investigating.
I had a few teensy problems locating the correct bit of woodland. We took a very scenic route across fields, along very overgrown jungly footpaths, through a quarry and then ended up having to scrabble under a barbed wire fence. Everyone, including the dog, thought this was all hugely exciting. Especially when we nearly fell in a hole with a wasp nest in it (although I don't think the dog noted that particular excitement - he was too busy looking for rabbits). The wasps didn't seem to notice us. However, I feel they probably would have noticed MightyShark putting his foot in their nest, so it's as well we managed to make a detour around it at the last minute.
We then wandered around the wood for about 15 minutes before realising that some of the remains of the airfield buildings were about 50 yards from where we had wormed our way under the fence. Ooops. Still, everyone stayed very good-tempered about the whole thing (phew). We couldn't actually spend very much time investigating the "spooky" ruins, because there was the small matter of the long walk back to the car.
Luckily, we had noticed a sign for a pub just near where we had left the car on the outskirts of a village. So the race was on to see if we could get there before they stopped serving food, as everyone was very hungry by this time. We avoided the field containing the wasp's nest, gave the dog a paddle in a pond and then practically jogged all the way back to the car, although still found time to play a game where we all swopped sunhats and had to do an impersonation of the person whose hat we were wearing. Quite funny, although I'm fairly sure I don't wave my arms about and squeak as much as MightyShark seems to think I do.
Everyone enjoyed their pub lunch and Adonis felt he had earned his pint. He then wore off his lunch when we got back home by taking MightyShark out on his bike. This means that the accompanying adult has to run behind MightyShark all the way, as MS has only just leart to ride without stabilisers and his steering is a bit erratic. Twinkletoes had to ride back home at one point to get water for Adonis.
Meanwhile, I sat in the nice cool office and worked.
