A Short Visit to Canterbury....

Following our stay at Crowborough we then moved on to Canterbury...
Our main reason to visit Canterbury was to visit Craig and Caroline who until January of this year had been the managers at the Tavistock C&CC site where we have spent the past three winters.....
They took over as managers of Canterbury C&CC site in March and we were eager to see them again and see how they were getting on in their new site......

The Canterbury site is very busy with units booking in in large numbers every day.... It tends to be a bit of a transit site with people using it as a starting point for the ferries to mainland Europe..... Also visitors from the ferry use it as their first site before setting off on their tour around the UK.

It was nice to see both Craig & Caroline again.... plus two of their assistants at the site had also been at Tavistock the winter before last,,,,nice to see them all.

Anne and I walked into Canterbury from the site...it only took about 30mins.... and we had a good look around the town which is very interesting and full of history...
As far as the Cathedral goes it really was the Church of England in full retail mode.......

You cannot even get into the Cathedral grounds without paying a substantial admission charge even more to actually see the Cathedral .
The only part of the building that you could see from 'outside' the wall of buildings surrounding it was part of the roof and spire which seemed to be covered in scaffolding anyway...
From outside the Pilgrims gate where lots of Tourists were lining up to hand over their entrance fees you could actually hear pneumatic drills and other building work coming from inside the cathedral so it was not actually selling itself to us as a place of peace and tranquility....
Needless to say we passed on this tourist hotspot...!!!

The Cathedral shop was something that you could access from outside on the street.... from what I could see it was full of typical tourist rubbish.....as I said..... the Cof E in full retail mode.....

We have visited numerous Cathedrals on our travels and at almost all of them you can view the outside of the building from the Cathedral grounds without payment. Some of them have an entrance charge and others request a donation for the upkeep of the building which we have always been happy to pay but a visit to Canterbury felt like the entance to a Theme Park...

What we did find just outside of the city was St Martins church.
This was the first church founded in England......the oldest parish church in continuous use and the oldest church in the English speaking world....
It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is well worth a visit.
A picture of St Martins is shown below......

St Martins Church- Canterbury

 Another place we visited was believe it or not...Ramsgate.
We had a really enjoyable visit to the town with a visit to the Ramsgate Royal Harbour Marina.. The Royal Temple Yacht Club overlooks the marina....
It's quite a cosmopolitan feel to the area around the marina which seems to set it apart from others that we have visited in the past....

While we were there we also walked out to the end of the harbour wall followed by a very nice meal before we set off back to Eva and the site....a journey taken by bus of course..

Part of Ramsgate Royal Harbour Marina.

 We only stayed at the Canterbury site for one week which for us is the shortest time that we have stayed anywhere since we set off in 2015..... But is was a very enjoyable one week.

The day before we left a number of trucks arrived at the site loaded with tents and equipment....
Craig told us that it was an advance party of German youngsters over here to set up a summer camp for more youngsters who were due to arrive the day that we were leaving.....

We watched these youngsters set up the camp...errecting over 25 bell tents plus other tents for kitchen....meeting place....etc...
It was really impressive to watch all these tents go up in double quick time.... each of these young people knew exactly what they had to do with some puttimg down the groundsheets...others laying out the tents....others putting in the centre poles and still more pegging them out. 
It was just like a military operation and as I said it was very impressive to watch all these young people working together as a team..... It reminded me of when I was their age and in the Scouts something which I really enjoyed....

Mind you....with 80 plus youngsters all arriving for their summer camp I was pleased that we were on the move again....

Just half of the full circle of Bell tents for the Summer Camp