Dogs.......!

One of the things that has surprised us since we have been staying on the various camping sites this year, are the number of people who have dogs in their motorhome campervan or caravan.
Often it's not just one dog either...often it's two or three... 

Now having owned dogs myself in the past I can understand the desire to have one or two for their company and the selfless love they give....truly man's best friend.... but more than that..?

In practical terms keeping a dog in a campsite vehicle is fine in nice weather, but with the wet and windy weather that we have been having recently trying to dry them off after a walk and keeping them and your motorhome/caravan clean must be a bit of a problem I reckon.

However, if you are a dog fan I suppose those difficulties are outweighed by the perceived benefits of dog ownership even during the past month of August which in the UK was the wettest for a century......
It certainly didn't put off the two ladies in this motorhome who had five....yes five dogs..!!

Five dogs in a motorhome.....

 While I am on the subject of dogs....if you always thought that sheep were a bit scared of dogs think again.... well at least down here on Dartmoor....
Anne and I were out on one of our moorland walks recently and passed a small farmhouse that ran a kennel business.....
This is what we saw......

Hiya doggies...You can't touch me..!!

One of the Dartmoor sheep had wandered down to the fence of the kennel area and seemed to be deliberately annoying  the dogs.....
The sheep seemed to be saying to the dogs "Hiya doggies...You can't touch me" and of course the dogs couldn't touch the sheep as they were behind a fence......
That sheep sure had the upper hand and seemed to take delight in rubbing the dogs noses in that fact.....the dogs were going wild barking and running around while the sheep just stood there smiling at them....
Dartmoor sheep are a tough lot...!!

As Promised...The Teardrop..!

For all you Reliant Robin and Teardrop Camping Trailer fans out there, as promised I managed to get some 'hitched up' images before the miniature rig left the site....

The owner told me that he was now heading off to Devils Bridge in Wales with his tiny unit to spend a month there....
At 40mph I think that he was going to have quite a long drive..... but hey....I would rather be driving this tiny rig than the monster Wildcat 5th wheel trailer I posted details about the other day.......Lots more fun to drive and camp in I think.....

Don't you just love it.....!!

As a bit of extra interest concerning the Wildcat......
He left the site today with his 5th wheel towed by a breakdown tow truck and his 7.2litre truck on the back of another breakdown tow truck....
It transpires that when reversing the monster rig on to the pitch here at the site he blew his gearbox to smithereens. 
I had wondered where all the oil on the campsite road had come from....the site manager has been working hard trying to clean it all up..........

Out on the moor.....

If we get one good day of weather we seem to pay the price with two or three days of rubbish weather.....
The other day we had one of the good days so it was a day out on the moor for Anne and I.....

Years ago when Anne lived in this area she often used to walk up to Pew Tor. As this was one of the Tors that I hadn't visited it was to be our lunch stop for the days walk..

Dartmoor Pony..

 Being camped right on the edge of the moor means that we can head off on a walk without having to use the car to get somewhere first which is always a plus mark for a site in our view...
The route up to Pew Tor took us along some very pretty Devon lanes before opening up on to the moor proper.....
We saw quite a few of the delightful Dartmoor ponies on route.....

Anne taking in the view from Pew Tor

 When we got up to the tor the wind was blowing quite strongly... 
One of the good things about choosing a tor as a lunch stop is that you can always find a nice little spot out of the wind...just tuck yourself in amongst the rocks and you will have a 'room with a view'...... a perfect place out of the wind with a superb view for you lunch stop...

The view from our lunch stop on Pew Tor

 After we had finished our lunch we checked out the map...... Anne had told me that she remembered that there was a cross not too far from the tor..... she seemed to think that it was the other side of Feather Tor which we could see in the distance.... looking at the map we planned the rest of our walk creating a loop that would take in the cross before heading back toward the campsite by a different route from our outward leg......

The Beckamoor Cross

 The cross stands to the north west of Feather Tor.....
It is a granite cross known as either the Beckamoor Cross or more romatically the Windy Post and Windy Stone...
It stands next to the murmuring Grimstone and Sortridge leet.....
English Heritage notes that the cross is of medieval origin and date it to between 1400 and 1499. (Although that is disputed)
Nowadays the cross is showing the effects of time from having cattle and ponies rubbing up against it and giving it a somewhat drunken tilt.....

Apparently the purpose of this cross was to act as a marker on the Tavistock to Ashburton trans-moor track which was a medieval route connecting Buckfast and Tavistock  Abbeys....

Another view of the Beckamoor Cross

I have always had a fascination for standing stones and crosses and have spent lots of time over the years taking images of them.....
Normally I prefer to take B&W images of these interesting subjects and have shown a few on my photographic blog..... However for this blog I have shown the cross in colour....

Little & Large...

The weather has been slightly improved today...
Instead of continuous rain, today has been bright and sunny one minute followed by sudden very heavy showers.... But I will settle for heavy showers every now and again if it means we don't have any more of the non stop stuff....

I thought that you might be interested in details of the largest and smallest units on site at the moment....

First the largest....it arrived today!  A Wildcat 5th wheel trailer.....
Naturally I asked the owner if he minded me taking a picture to share with you all on my blog and he said no problem and invited me in to have a look around.....

I realize that my readers in the USA see a lot of these and if you travel to Spain you would see a number of them as well. 
However in the UK it is not often that you will come across a 5th wheel trailer on site.....

The Wildcat 5th Wheel Trailer

 I have to say that when looking around the Wildcat it dawned on me that it is not really camping by any stretch of the imagination.....
With two large slides on one side and a huge canopy on the other.....a large lounge and kitchen area..... a large fixed bed.... full size shower and a porcelain (not the usual plastic) toilet unit plus electric everything it is certainly 'beyond glamping'.

Kitchen area of the Widcat

In the picture above you can see the kitchen and the start of the lounge area at the camera end....
Even the kitchen cabinets rise up and down to various heights at the push of a button to suit the height of the occupants.......

The Wildcat main bedroom

The unit can sleep four people ...two in the main bedroom and the other two in fold down beds in the lounge.......

Would I want one.....?
Well the luxury would be very nice....but towing it...well that's another matter. 
I would need something a lot bigger than the CRV to tow it.....The owner has a truck with a 7.2litre engine......
It's bad enough towing Eva along narrow Devon country lanes... Towing the Wildcat up here to the site must have been a bit of a nightmare...well it certainly would have been for me.

Talking of nightmares...that's what it must be when you look at your fuel bill for towing the flipping thing........

Interestingly, the owner told me how much he had paid for it... He bought it secondhand and it cost half as much as Eva cost me.... A pretty good bargain I would say.....

However.... Great as it is I will stick with Eva the Eriba....

And now for the smallest unit on site..... I mentioned this unit in one of my previous posts.......

Currently the smallest unit on site,,,,

Yes it's the Sleeper Teardrop trailer towed by the little three wheeled Reliant Robin.....
Even the awning is bigger than the trailer.....
Small as it is the owner seems to have all the mod cons (like the Wildcat?) including television (checkout the aerial).

If I am around when the Reliant leaves the site with the teardrop on tow I will try and get a picture and share it with you......

Summer...?

It's now a week since we had a couple of nice sunny days...luckily while my Daughter and family were here, since then it's been rain....rain...rain and more rain...
Today our view from the awning:- Was.....

Yes...It's more rain...

Yes...It's more rain....

I must say that I am pretty fed up with this continuous bad weather,
We are now half way through our month long stay here and due to the weather I have not been on my bike yet.....

We are constantly glued to the weather app on our phones.... watching out for that break in the weather when we can get a walk in between the torrential rain....

Not much else to report at the moment..!!

Summer..? Typical British summer weather......

Two good days....

On Monday my daughter and her husband came to spend a couple of days with us...obviously my two grandsons came too....
Despite having terrible traffic congestion on the way down, they did at least bring nice bright sunny weather with them.....

One of the most entertaining things when staying on a campsite is watching new arrivals setting up their camp....
I offered to help them with putting up the awning but my daughter told me it was all under control so I settled back in my chair and watched the proceedings unfold...as I said always good entertainment...
Anne on the other hand did something far more useful than just watching them with their awning and made them all a cup of tea and got the cakes out.....

My daughter and her husband sorting out their awning....

If you checkout the picture of them above with their awning, look at the background on the right hand side and you can just see a tiny tear drop caravan with a small porch style awning.....
This is actually towed by a Reliant Robin three-wheeler. 
I don't think that I have ever seen a tear drop caravan quite so small......

Not long and the awning was up...(Reliant Robin in the background)

 Anyway it wasn't long before they had everything set up..... 
That evening we had a game of football with the boys followed by a board game in our awning.....it was midnight before we all got to bed......

The plan for the next day was a moorland walk taking in a couple of the many Tors that are scattered all over Dartmoor....
The weather was absolutely perfect for it....

The first stage from the campsite was a climb up to the car park that sits below Cox Tour....
As luck would have it, just as we arrived at the car park the Ice cream van that is regularly there arrived from Tavistock so it was ice creams all round.....

We then headed off up to the top of Cox Tor...Having done that we headed off in the direction of Great Staple Tor where we had lunch....but not before the boys had climbed to the top for a photo....
Scrambling to the top is one thing...getting back down again can often be a bit more of a problem as they found out.....

The Lads on the top of the Tor.....

Getting back down proved harder than scrambling up

On the way back we took in Middle Staple Tor and also Little Staple Tor.....
In all it was a great fun day and everyone enjoyed themselves.

I have to admit that I was so worn out I had to have a 45 minute lie down after my evening meal in order to prepare myself for another session of game playing in the awning.....

Today they had to leave us and return home and what a change in the weather again.....
We woke up to non stop rain so it was a good thing that they had had the foresight to pack away their awning last night.....

We all had breakfast in our awning and then they headed off back home at about midday....
It hasn't stopped raining all day........

Uphill everywhere......

Well, we have been here now for almost a week and I have to say that whatever you want to do, be it walk or cycle, it's uphill everywhere....
Mind you one of the great pleasures of going up, after the view, is the coming down....
I have just seen a cyclist coming down pork hill and he must have been touching fifty miles an hour so I can't wait to have a go too.....

Anne and I have managed to do a bit of walking again and the Dartmoor countryside is a mighty fine area in which to do it....
Anne grew up in this area and knows it well so who better than to be on the moors walking with......

I've added a couple of pictures below from a recent walk as well as a snapshot view of the start of pork hill as it passes our campsite...

My Daughter and family will be arriving tomorrow for a short stay with us and we are both looking forward to seeing them all....the weather forecast is looking quite good too......

Walking up towards Cox Tor

They build substantial walls in these parts...

The lower slope of Pork Hill as it passes our campsite...