The Isle of Wight

This past weekend was a long weekend, so Bronson booked a camp site on the Isle of Wight, Bembridge to be exact, on the East side of the Island. We were planning on a quiet family weekend with Leo. This plan however went up in smoke….but I’ll get to that in a minute.

We packed the car on Friday night in prep for a fairly early start on Saturday morning. It was down to Portsmouth to catch the 10:30 ferry. The Isle of Wight is stupidly close to the mainland, people often swim the gap though with the amount of boats out there I wouldn’t do that in a hurry.

Leo had his breakfast in the car park of a local supermarket and then promptly fell asleep for the boat journey.





Once on the Island we headed clockwise around the edge to get to our campsite. We discovered that traffic was quite hectic on the narrow roads, firstly because it was a long weekend and there were loads of tourists (including us) and secondly there was the annual scooter rally taking place in Ryde with about 6000 scooters expected. There was also speedboat racing in Cowes…busy little Island this!!!!

Once we found our camp site, we attempted to pitch our tent and look after Leo all at the same time. For the most part, Leo got away with eating stuff off the floor and chewing the wheel of his pram.

We where just chilling out in the tent when Bronson heard some neighbours arrive, then we heard South African accents, Bronson decided to go out and offer a helping hand, incase we had to do some apologising later for Leo’s loud protests. Only to discover that one of our neighbours was Clint, a guy B was in the army with 15 years ago. Now what a small world.


So the weekend turned into a marathon of braaing, drinking and socialising. Bronson is still trying to recover from the hangover!!!! Needless to say, it was great for him to meet up with an old friend, and we made some really nice new friends too. All South African of course.

One of the couples had a 2 ½ year old son, so Leo had some company too.

We did manage to take Leo down to the beach, and also for a few swims in the indoor pool. Bronson took him down a water slide, which was really funny to watch, not sure what he made of that.

On Monday, our neighbours left pretty early to make their ferry, ours was only at 6pm so to kill time we went to a butterfly park.

They had this indoor area where the butterflies are kept, Leo loved trying to watch them as they flew past on their random flight paths. We then went through a fountain display area. The ponds had koi living in them and Leo found these very fasinating. They also had this cool thing for kids, some sort of clown band playing jazz, he loved this too. It was really weird to see him so quiet and concentrating for so long on all the sights and sounds around him. All these new experiences.

We then made our way back to the ferry departure point, Leo ate his dinner in the coffee shop, due to a lack of highchairs we made a plan with one of his muslin squares and simply tied him to his seat. He was not impressed.

All in all, a really great weekend…now just to get through the mountain of washing…