England Summer 2013, Final Part – Minnis Bay

My last day with the kids was lovely and warm.  We had wanted to go fossil hunting, but we were woefully unprepared for that (I didn’t research enough beforehand) and the organised tours were suspended because the main guy had hurt himself and wasn’t up to clambering about over rocks to show eager children where they could find fossils.

Instead, we just kinda headed for the north Kent coast and winged it.

The traffic diabolical, even though we left early, so I pulled off the motorway at Whitstable and eventually we came to a traditional English seaside promenade with a grassed clifftop area, a pebble beach and gorgeous multicolour beach huts.

We had a little walk along the promenade to check out the beach huts in more detail.

After a quick walk and some snacks, we decided that we wanted sand and a better beach, so off we drove, heading for Broadstairs.  But on the map was a large bay (Minnis Bay) with sandy beaches, so we made our way there, not knowing what it would be like.

Well, it was packed for a start!   We scouted around the beaches and the kids decided that they wanted to stay, so I paid for the car-park and we made our way down to the beach.

The tide was coming in pretty fast which was funny – so many people had to keep moving their stuff backwards on the ever shrinking beach.

Still, the sea was warm and clean and it was a lovely shallow sandy beach guarded by lifeguards, which meant I could relax and let Ella and Henry play without having to be next to them all the time.  They had a ton of fun swimming and playing, digging and splashing about.

Then it was time to make sea defences!!

But they were quickly breached by the rapidly rising tide.

And everyone on the beach prepared to abandon their posts and scurried like ants on to the sea wall.

We retreated back until we were right back at the sea wall.  But we had enough dry sand to make a wall that kept the sea out. Ella and Henry were joined by some other kids who all worked hard until they were triumphant!

And that was pretty much the end of the day – we packed up and got changed and drove home  We stopped off for a late lunch of snacks (as we’d not managed to find time for lunch as we were having so much fun) and recounted our stories of the battles with the tide!

Kids happy, Daddy (slightly sunburned) happy, Kent coast – score 1 for a day very well played.

Sadly, that was pretty much it – the next morning we packed up and I drove the kids back to Suffolk to their house in the pouring rain. We’d certainly made hay with the weather over the 2 weeks.

Time to leave is always the worst – I hate breaking their little hearts and the goodbye always seems so sudden and hard, even though we’ve usually had 4 hours of more on the last day preparing for it.

But there’s good news!  I’ll be seeing them again in a few months – I finally found a combination  of flights I could (kind of) afford, so I’m flying back to England at in December to bring them back here for a hot Australian Christmas.  I can’t wait.

Photographers Footnote:

I hope you enjoyed all the photos – I only used the Fuji X100 this year and I was mostly very impressed.  I miss the depth of field that the DSLR and the 50  or 30mm lenses offer, but the little X100 is so much easier to carry about and generally produces images that need very little adjustment in Lightroom later, which greatly simplified my editing workflow.

For a travel camera, as long as you have some spare batteries, it’s a revelation.  I’m tempted by the better and faster focussing X100S (as that is one weak spot for the X100) but it’s really only a minor quibble.  If you want really awesome DSLR like portraits, you’ll still have to use a DSLR until manufacturers can somehow do some magic with focal lengths and compact bodies.  But if you want a ton of lovely bright colourful high quality travel shots – the X100 is brilliant.