June and July, and an August adventure in Anglesey

What happened to June and July? We clearly blinked and missed them. I can’t believe it’s two months since we arrived back home from Ireland. So what have we been up to? A question we often ask ourselves at the end of a week and struggle to answer.

Arriving back from Ireland we were thrown into a bit of a whirlwind. The day after we got home, Mum’s care home rang to say we’d need to find her somewhere else to live. They weren’t serving notice, but she and the other residents weren’t getting along and it was getting tricky to manage. A friend of mine who has had parents with dementia once described to me that it’s ‘moments of calm, between each crisis’, fortunately this crisis had arrived when we were back home so after several visits to other care homes, within a week we managed to get her moved to somewhere more suitable.

We have met lots of people on the road with elderly parents. Some choose to keep traveling, others, like us, head home to help out. As with everything in life, it’s a personal choice that you can’t judge. We’ve talked it through lots between ourselves and to us being home most of the time feels like the right thing to do. So that’s why we’re currently only do the odd trip of a few weeks rather than our previous months-long adventures.

In between care home visits, we both took part in the Derby Ramathon half marathon. Jay got a cracking time of 1hr 28 – a personal best, and I just enjoyed taking part. That’s my new running goal, I’m no longer focussing on times, simply making sure each run brings enjoyment.

This is greatly helped by the folks I get to run with each week from our running club, the Kimberley and District Striders. I never thought I’d be the sort of person who would be part of a running club, but it’s a great motivator and for me it’s also part running, part social and part therapy – we do always have a good chat. There’s also a great community spirit in the club, and we’ve been helping out with a monthly litter pick in our town.

Also in June we nipped over to Birmingham to see Elton John in concert. It was a fantastic show and boy does he still have a cracking voice (if you haven’t seen it yet, I would seriously recommend watching his Glastonbury set on BBC iPlayer).

From our seats back here Elton was tiny, but he still sounded good.

We had a low key celebration for Jay’s birthday visting a favourite walk in Derbyshire and friends. Apart from having the day off for that, he has had his nose stuck in a laptop for a lot of the time writing our next book. I take my hat off to him as it takes soooo long to write them, and then he passes it to me to pull apart all his hard work when I do the editing. After feedback on our previous books, this one is going to be in colour so we get to look back through thousands of our photos each bringing a memory with it.

At the start of July we joined Jay’s Dad and Sister for a week in Whitby. We’ve spent quite a few weeks there in the past both in our motorhome and staying in cottages. This time we were about a mile out of the town, but as Jay’s Dad has a Blue Badge, it meant he could park his car right on the seafront and easily access the sights.

We had a great week visiting some of our favourite places with them. Jay and his family braved the high seas on a two hour boat trip. I’m so glad I skipped it because it was very choppy, so much so that someone threw up on Jay’s sisters shoes!

For a much more sedate trip, we all took the steam train to Pickering for the day. It tipped with down with rain when we arrived, so we hopped straight back on the train and got off at Goathland instead to see where Heartbeat and some of Harry Potter was filmed.

While up t’north, we also took the opportunity to meet up with our friends Richard and Jenny who we first met while motorhoming in Scandinavia back in 2016. They now live in Bridlington, so we met them halfway in Scarborough.

We were treated to a guided tour of the town as Richard spent a lot of time there as a child. This included the usual sights as well as a huge man, stuffed animals, and the biggest ice cream I’ve ever had. It was lovely to catch up with them, especially as they were fresh back from their latest adventure, walking the coast to coast path, so we could quiz them about the best way to do it.

After Whitby we took a trip to Matlock in Derbyshire for a glass blowing experience that I bought Jay for his birthday. Last year we made threw clay to make bowls at Denby pottery and for my birthday we learned how to carve a wooden spoon, so making a glass seemed like a good addition to our homemade set.

Jonathan welcomed us to Lumsdale Glass where we were happy to gather around the huge glowing furnaces as the weather had turned and it was raining and cold outside. We were talked through a few safety points – we would be handling molten glass and hot metal poles – before Jonathan made it look really easy demonstrating what we’d get to do.

We got to choose coloured glass pieces to add to our glass to make it unique – both of us opting for the same blue to match our pottery bowls. Jay went first, skillfully being directed by Jonathan. There were many steps including rolling the molten glass in the coloured chips, reheating it, moulding it with his hands (protected only by a wet yellow pages), blowing the glass into a shape and using tools to form the opening.

When it was my turn I was very surprised at how heavy the glass was on the end of the blowing rod, and how easily it got out of shape if you stopped turning it for a second. The blowing part was like trying to inflate a balloon, but a really tough balloon and had us both very red in the face.

It was a fantastic experience and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone. We went back a few days later to collect our ‘creations’, and were pleasantly surprised that while they might be a bit wobbly and unique, they do hold liquid and you can drink from them.

At the end of July we both caught Covid. We’d all but forgotten about it, then one morning we both woke with itchy throats. We’d been out at a local pub on the Sunday and a sudden downpour had seen everyone retreat inside. Jay tested positive on the Tuesday, me and our two friends who we’d been in the pub with were positive on Wednesday.

For about a week we all felt pretty rubbish, messaging each other with various symptoms while holding down the sofa. Fortunately I didn’t pass it on to my Mum when I visited her in the care home on Monday morning, but it was weighing on my mind for a week.

A week of being stuck in the cooler helped us to realise that we needed another trip away. So we dug out the list of things to fix on Zagan that we wrote when we got back from our last trip, and started to sort them. A new water pump was fitted, as was a new drain-down valve. Zagan was also given a bit of an interior refresh with seat covers and some fake tiles in the kitchen.

Once we were both fit and well we packed the cupboards with food and clothes and set off. We’ve decided to head back to Anglesey as we loved the couple of days we had on the island at end of our Ireland trip. We’ve just over two weeks to explore and will be mainly staying in Camping and Caravan Club Temporary Holiday Sites as it’s peak holiday season and we expect the campsites to be busy and expensive.

Ju x